Letters to dead authors

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DEAD AUTHORS

LETTERS

TO

DEAD AUTHORS

BY

ANDREW LANG

^^ OF THE

KITBHSIT

9".

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

1886

^// rights reserved

MS' so

/

fV)/MAj

ro
MISS THACKERAY

THESE KXER«:iSKS

IN THE ART OF DIPPING

ARK DEDICATED

t5SL^

PREFACE,

Sixteen of these Letters, which were
written at the suggestion of the Editor
of the * St. James's Gazette,' appeared
in that journal, from which they are
now reprinted, by the Editor's kind per-
mission. They have been somewhat
emended, and a few additions have been
made. The Letters to Horace, Byron,
Isaak Walton, Chapelain, Ronsard, and
Theocritus have not been published
before.

The gem on the title-page, now en-
graved for the first time, is a red cor-
nelian in the British Museum, probably

viii PREFACE

Graeco- Roman, and treated in an archa-
istic style. It represents Hermes Psycha-
gogos, with a Soul, and has some like-
ness to the Baptism of Our Lord, as
usually shown in art. Perhaps it may
be post-Christian. The gem was se-
lected by Mr. A. S. Murray.

It is, perhaps, superfluous to add
that some of the Letters are written
rather to suit the Correspondent than
to express the writer's own taste or
opinions. The Epistle to Lord Byron,
especially, is ' writ in a manner which
is my aversion.'

>^^ ■ .. ^ \-;

CONtENTiS:^

I. TO W. M. THACKERAY ... I

II. TO CHARLES DICKENS . .. * •- * • lO

7

III. TO PIERRE DE RONSARD • A • • 22

IV. TO HERODCp-tJS 34

V. EPISTLE TO MR. ALEXANDER POPE . 46

VI. TO LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA . • • 55

VII. TO MAITRE FRAN9OYS RABELAIS . 66

VIII, TO JANE AUSTEN 75

» IX. TO MASTER ISAAK WALTON . . 86

. X, TO M. CHAPELAIN . . . . 98

XL TO SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILI.E, KT. . IIO

XII. TO ALEXANDRE DUMAS. . . . II9

XIII. TO THEOCRITUS .... I30

XIV, TO -EDGAR ALLAN I'OE . . . . I40

X CONTENTS

XV. TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART. . . I52

XVI. TO EUSEBIUS OF Ci«:SAREA . . . 162

XVII. TO PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY . - ^IZ^

XVIII. TO MONSIEUR DE MOLlfeRE, VALET DE

CHAMBRE DU ROI . . . . 184

XIX. TO ROBERT BURNS .... 195

♦ XX. TO LORD BYRON 205

XXI. TO OMAR KHAYYAM . . . . 2l6

► XXII. TO Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS . . . 223

ui^IVBRSITY;
LETTERS

TO

DEAD AUTHORS.

I.

To W. M. Thackeray.

Sir, — There are many things that
stand in the way of the critic when he
has a mind to praise the living. He may
dread the charge of writing rather to vex
a rival than to exalt the subject of his
applause. He shuns the appearance of
seeking the favour of the famous, and
would not willingly be regarded as one
of the many parasites who now advertise
each movement and action of contempo-
rary genius. * Such and such men of
letters are passing their summer hohdays
in the Val d'Aosta,' or the Mountains

B

2 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as
it may happen. So reports our Hterary
' Court Circular,' and all our Precieuses
read the tidings with enthusiasm. Lastly,
if the critic be quite new to the world of
letters, he may superfluously fear to vex
a poet or a novelist by the abundance of
his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us
when, with all our hearts, we would com-
mend the departed ; for they have passed
almost beyond the reach even of envy ;
and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
commendation can bring the red.

You, above all others, were and re-
main without a rival in your many-sided
excellence, and praise of you strikes at
none of those who have survived your
day. The increase of time only mellows
your renown, and each year that passes
and brings you no successor does but
sharpen the keenness of our sense of loss .
In what other novelist, since Scott was
worn down by the burden of a forlorn
endeavour, and died for honour's sake,
has the world found so many of the fair-

THACKERAY 3

est gifts combined ? If we may not call
you a poet (for the first of English writers
of light verse did not seek that crown),
who that was less than a poet ever saw
life with a glance so keen as yours, so
steady, and so sane ? Your pathos was
never cheap, your laughter never forced ;
your sigh was never the pulpit trick of
the preacher. Your funny people — your
Costigans and Fokers — were not mere
characters of trick and catch-word, were
not empty comic masks. Behind each
the human heart was beating ; and ever
and again we were allowed to see the
features of the man.

Thus fiction in your hands was not
simply a profession, like another, but a
constant reflection of the whole surface
of life : a repeated echo of its laughter
and its complaint. Others have written,
and not written badly, with the stolid
professional regularity of the clerk at his
desk ; you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might
have said that ' it needs heaven-sent mo-
ments for this skill' There are, it will not

B 2

4 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

surprise you, some honourable women
and a few men who call you a cj'nic ;
who speak of 'the withered world of
Thackerayan satire ; ' who think your
eyes were ever turned to the sordid as-
pects of life — to the mother-in-law who
threatens to ' take away her silver bread-
basket ; ' to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant ; to the Beckys, and Barnes
Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of this
world. The quarrel of these sentimen-
talists is really with life, not with you ;
they might as wisely blame Monsieur
Buffon because there are snakes in his
Natural History. Had you not impaled
certain noxious human insects, you
would have better pleased Mr. Ruskin ;
had you confined yourself to such per-
formances, you would have been more
dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in
fiction.

You are accused of never having
drawn a good woman who was not a doll,
but the ladies that bring this charge sel-
dom remind us either of Lady Castle-

THACKERAY 5

wood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert.
The best women can pardon you Becky
Sharp and Blanche Amory ; they find
it harder to forgive you Emmy Sedley
and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man
does not know in his heart that the best
women — God bless them — lean, in their
characters, either to the sweet passiveness
of Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous
affections of Helen ? 'Tis Heaven, not
you, that made them so ; and they are
easily pardoned, both for being a very
little lower than the angels and for their
gentle ambition to be painted, as by
Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps
and haloes. So ladies have occasionally
seen their own faces in the glass of fancy,
and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola
and Consuelo. Yet when these fair ideal-
ists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot,
designed Rosamund Vincy and Horace,
was there not a spice of malice in the
portraits which we miss in your least
favourable studies }

That the creator of Colonel New-

6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

come and of Henry Esmond was a
snarling cynic ; that he who designed
Rachel Esmond could not draw a good
woman : these are the chief charges (all
indifferent now to you, who were once
so sensitive) that your admirers have to
contend against. A French critic, M.
Taine, also protests that you do preach
too much. Did any author but yourself
so frequently break the thread (seldom
a strong thread) of his plot to converse
with his reader and moralise his tale, we
also might be offended. But who that
loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that
likes the wise trifling of the one and can
bear with the melancholy of the other,
but prefers your preaching to another's
playing !

Your thoughts come in, like the
intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an
ornament and source of fresh delight.
Like the songs of the Chorus, they bid
us pause a moment over the wider laws
and actions of human fate and human
life, and we turn from your persons to

THACKERAY 7

yourself, and again from yourself to your
persons, as from the odes of Sophocles
or Aristophanes to the action of their
characters on the stage. Nor, to my
taste, does the mere music and melan-
choly dignity of your style in these
passages of meditation fall far below the
highest efforts of poetry. I remember
that scene where Clive, at Barnes New-
come's Lecture on the Poetry of the Af-
fections, sees Ethel who is lost to him.
'And the past and its dear histories, and
youth and its hopes and passions, and
tones and looks for ever echoing in the
heart and present in the memory — these,
no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as
he looked across the great gulf of time,
and parting and grief, and beheld the
woman he had loved for many years.'

For ever echoing in the heart and pre-
sent in the memory : who has not heard
these tones, who does not hear them as
he turns over your books that, for so
many years, have been his companions
and comforters ? We have been young

8 LE ITERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

and old, we have been sad and merry
with you, we have listened to the mid-
night chimes with Pen and Warrington,
have stood with you beside the death-
bed, have mourned at that yet more
awful funeral of lost love, and with you
have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred
to our old and immortal affections, a leal
souvenir I And whenever you speak
for yourself, and speak in earnest, how
magical, how rare, how lonely in our
literature is the beauty of your sentences !
* I can't express the charm of them ' (so
you write of George Sand ; so we may
write of you) : ' they seem to me like
the sound of country bells, provoking
I don't know what vein of music and
meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly
on the ear.' Surely that style, so fresh,
so rich, so full of surprises — that style
which stamps as classical your fragments
of slang, and perpetually astonishes and
delights — would alone give immortality
to an author, even had he little to say.
But you, with your whole wide world of

THACKERAY g

fops and fools, of good women and brave
men, of honest absurdities and cheery ad-
venturers : you who created the Steynes
and NewcomeSjthe Beckys and Blanches,
Captain Costigan and F. B., and the
Chevalier Strong — all that host of
friends imperishable — you must survive
with Shakespeare and Cervantes in the
memory and affection of men.

10 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

II.

To ChaiHes Dickens.

Sir, — It has been said that every
man is born a Platonist or an Aristote-
lian, though the enormous majority of
us, to be sure, live and die without being
conscious of any invidious philosophic
partiality whatever. With more truth
(though that does not imply very much)
every Englishman who reads may be
said to be a partisan of yourself or of
Mr. Thackeray. Why should there be
any partisanship in the matter ; and
why, having two such good things as
your novels and those of your contem-
porary, should we not be silently happy
in the possession ? Well, men are made
so, and must needs fight and argue
over their tastes in enjoyment. For

DICKENS II

myself, I may say that in this matter I
am what the Americans do 7iot call a
' Mugwump,' what English politicians
dub a 'superior person ' — that is, I take
no side, and attempt to enjoy the best
of both.

It must be owned that this attitude
is sometimes made a little difficult by
the vigour of your special devotees.
They have ceased, indeed, thank
Heaven ! to imitate you ; and even in
' descriptive articles ' the touch of Mr.
Gigadibs, of him whom ' we almost took
for the true Dickens,' has disappeared.
The young lions of the Press no longer
mimic your less admirable mannerisms
— do not strain so much after fantastic
comparisons, do not (in your manner
and Mr. Carlyle's) give people nick-
names derived from their teeth, or their
complexion ; and, generally, we are
spared second-hand copies of all that in
your style was least to be commended.
But, though improved by lapse of time
in this respect, your devotees still put on

12 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

little conscious airs of virtue, robust
manliness, and so forth, which would
have irritated you very much, and there
survive some press men who seem to
have read you a little (especially your
later works), and never to have read
anything else. Now familiarity with the
pages of ' Our Mutual Friend ' and
' Dombey and Son ' does not precisely
constitute a liberal education, and the
assumption that it does is apt (quite
unreasonably) to prejudice people against
the greatest comic genius of modern
times.

On the other hand, Time is at last
beginning to sift the true admirers of
Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in
the best sense of the word, is a popular
success, a popular reputation. For ex-
ample, I know that, in a remote and
even Pictish part of this kingdom, a
rural household, humble and under the
shadow of a sorrow inevitably approach-
ing, has found in * David Copperfield '
oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sick-

DICKENS 13

ness. On the other hand, people are
now picking up heart to say that ' they
cannot read Dickens,' and that they par-
ticularly detest * Pickwick.' I believe it
was young ladies who first had the cour-
age of their convictions in this respect.
* Tout sied aux belles,' and the fair, in
the confidence of youth, often venture on
remarkable confessions. In your ' Natural
History of Young Ladies ' I do not re-
member that you describe the Humorous
Young Lady.^ She is a very rare bird
indeed, and humour generally is at a
deplorably low level in England.

Hence come all sorts of mischief,
arisen since you left us ; and it may
be said that inordinate philanthropy,
genteel sympathy with Irish murder
and arson, Societies for Badgering the
Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a score of
other plagues, including what was once
called ^stheticism, are all, primarily,

' I am informed that the Natural Histoiy of
Young Ladies is attributed, by some writers, to
another philosopher, the author of The Art of Pluck.

14 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

due to want of humour. People discuss,
with the gravest faces, matters which
properly should only be stated as the
wildest paradoxes. It naturally follows
that, in a period almost destitute ol
humour, many respectable persons ' can-
not read Dickens,' and are not ashamed
to glory in their shame. We ought not
to be angry with others for their mis-
fortunes ; and yet when one meets the
cretins who boast that they cannot read
Dickens, one certainly does feel much
as Mr. Samuel Weller felt when he en-
countered Mr. Job Trotter.

How very singular has been the
history of the decline of humour! Is
there any profound psychological truth
to be gathered from consideration of
the fact that humour has gone out with
cruelty ? A hundred years ago, eighty
years ago — nay, fifty years ago — we
were a cruel but also a humorous
people. We had bull-baitings, and
badger-drawings, and hustings, and
prize-fights, and cock-fights ; we went

DICKENS 15

to see men hanged ; the pillory and the
stocks were no empty ' terrors unto evil-
doers,' for there was commonly a male-
factor occupying each of these insti-
tutions. With all this we had a broad-
blown comic sense. We had Hogarth,
and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank,
and Gilray ; we had Leech and Surtees,
and the creator of Tittlebat Titmouse ;
we had the Shepherd of the * Noctes,'
and, above all, we ha.d you.

From the old giants of English fun
— burly persons delighting in broad
caricature, in decided colours, in cockney
jokes, in swashing blows at the more
prominent and obvious human follies—
from these you derived the splendid
high spirits and unhesitating mirth of
your earlier works. Mr. Squeers, and
Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all
the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and
John Browdie — these and their immortal
companions were reared, so to speak,
on the beef and beer of that naughty,
fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England,

1 6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

which we have improved out of exist-
ence. And these characters, assuredly,
are your best ; by them, though stupid
people cannot read about them, you
will live while there is a laugh left
among us. Perhaps that does not
assure you a very prolonged existence,
but only the future can show.

The dismal seriousness of the time
cannot, let us hope, last for ever and a
day. Honest old Laughter, the true
luti7i of your inspiration, must have life
left in him yet, and cannot die ; though
it is true that the taste for your pathos,
and your melodrama, and plots con-
structed after your favourite fashion
(* Great Expectations ' and the * Tale of
Two Cities ' are exceptions) may go by
and never be regretted. Were people
simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as
far as your pathos is concerned, a
generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-
headed shallow critic, who declared
that Wordsworth 'would never do,'
cried, 'wept like anything,' over your

DICKENS 17

Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily
as ever with Dick Swiveller ; but who
can cry over Little Nell ?

Ah, Sir, how could you— who knew
so intimately, who remembered so
strangely well the fancies, the dreams,
the sufferings of childhood — how could
you * wallow naked in the pathetic,' and
massacre holocausts of the Innocents ?
To draw tears by gloating over a child's
death-bed, was it worthy of you ? Was
it the kind of work over which our
hearts should melt? I confess that
Little Nell might die a dozen times,
and be welcomed by whole legions of
Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl
mentioned by Pet Marjory) would re-
main unmoved.

She was more than usual calm.
She did not give a single dam,

wrote the astonishing child who diverted
the leisure of Scott. Over your Little
Nell and your Little Dombey I remain
more than usual calm ; and probably

C

1 8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

SO do thousands of your most sincere
admirers. But about matter of this
kind, and the unsealing of the fountains
of tears, who can argue ? Where is taste ?
where is truth ? What tears are ' manly,
Sir, manly,' as Fred Bayham has it ; and
of what lamentations ought we rather
to be ashamed ? Stmt lacrymce rerum ;
one has been moved in the cell where
Socrates tasted the hemlock ; or by
the river-banks where Syracusan arrows
slew the parched Athenians among the
mire and blood ; or, in fiction, when
Colonel New come says Adsum, or over
the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where
Aramis laments, with strange tears, the
death of Porthos. But over Dombey
(the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to
snivel.

When an author deliberately sits
down and says, ' Now, let us have a
good cry,' he poisons the wells of sensi-
bility and chokes, at least in many
breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of
' Dombey and Son ' there is little we

DICKENS 19

care to remember except the deathless
Mr. Toots ; just as we forget the melo-
dramatics of * Martin Chuzzlewit' I
have read in that book a score of times ;
I never see it but I revel in it — in
Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the
Americans. But what the plot is all
about, what Jonas did, what Montagu
Tigg had to make in the matter, what
all the pictures with plenty of shading
illustrate, I have never been able to
comprehend. In the same way, one of
your most thorough-going admirers has
allowed (in the licence of private con-
versation) that ' Ralph Nickleby and
Monk are too steep ; ' and probably a
cultivated taste will always find them a
little precipitous.

'Too steep:' — the slang expresses
that defect of an ardent genius, carried
above itself, and out of the air we
breathe, both in its grotesque and in its
gloomy imaginations. To force the
note, to press fantasy too hard, to
deepen the gloom with black over the

c 2

20 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

indigo, that was the failing which proved
you mortal. To take an instance in
little : when Pip went to Mr. Pumble-
chook's, the boy thought the seedsman
'a very happy man to have so many
little drawers in his shop.' The reflection
is thoroughly boyish ; but then you add,
' I wondered whether the flower-seeds
and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to
break out of those jails and bloom.'
That is not boyish at all ; that is the
hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
work.

* So we arraign her ; but she,' the
Genius of Charles Dickens, how brilliant,
how kindly, how beneficent she is ! dwell-
ing by a fountain of laughter imperish-
able ; though there is something of an
alien salt in the neighbouring fountain
of tears. How poor the world of fancy
would be, how ' dispeopled of her
dreams,' if, in some ruin of the social
system, the books of Dickens were lost ;
and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates,
and Mr. Crinkly and Miss Squeers and

DICKENS 21

Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick
Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish
with Menander's men and women ! We
cannot think of our world without them ;
and, children of dreams as they are, they
seem more essential than great states-
men, artists, soldiers, who have actually
worn flesh and blood, ribbons and
orders, gowns and uniforms. May we
not almost welcome ' Free Education ' }
for every Englishman who can read,
unless he be an Ass, is a reader the
more for you.

P.S. — Alas, how strangely are we
tempered, and how strong is the national
bias ! I have been saying things of you
that I would not hear an enemy say.
When I read, in the criticism of an
American novelist, about your ' hysteri-
cal emotionality ' (for he writes in Ame-
rican), and your ' waste of verbiage,' I
am almost tempted to deny that our
Dickens has a single fault, to deem you
impeccable !

22 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

III.

To Pierre de Ronsard

(prince of poets).

Master and Prince of Poets, —
As we know what choice thou madest of
a sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by
the jealousy of Fate), so we know well
the manner of thy chosen immortality.
In the Plains Elysian, among the heroes
and the ladies of old song, there was
thy Love with thee to enjoy her paradise
in an eternal spring.

La du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle

Sans eschange le stcii,
La terre sans labetir, de sa grasse mamelle,

Toute chose y produit ;
D^enbas la troupe sainte atitrefois amotireuse.

Nous honorant stir tous,
Viendra nous saltier, s''estimant bien-heureuse

De s'accointer de nous.

PIERRE DE RONSARD 23

There thou dwellest, with the learned
lovers of old days, with Belleau, and Du
Bellay, and BaKf, and the flower of the
maidens of Anjou. Surely no rumour
reaches thee, in that happy place of
reconciled affections, no rumour of the
rudeness of Time, the despite of men,
and the change which stole from thy
locks, so early grey, the crown of laurels
and of thine own roses. - How different
from thy choice of a sepulchre have been
the fortunes of thy tomb !

I will that none should break
The marble for my sake,
Wishful to make more fair
My sepulchre !

So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet
numbers run in my rude English.
Wearied of Courts and of priories, thou
didst desire a grave beside thine own
Loire, not remote from

The caves, the founts that fall
From the high mountain wall,
That fall and flash and fleet,
With silver feet.

24 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Only a laurel tree
Shall guard the grave of me ;
Only Apollo's bough
Shall shade me now !

Far other has been thy sepulchre : not
in the free air, among the field flowers,
but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with
marble for a monument, and no green
grass to cover thee. Restless wert thou
in thy life ; thy dust was not to be restful
in thy death. The Huguenots, ces noti-
veaux Chretiens qui la France ont pillee^
destroyed thy tomb, and the warning of
the later monument,

ABI, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCAS HUMUM SACRA EST,

has** not scared away malicious men.
The storm that passed over France a
hundred years ago, more terrible than
the religious wars that thou didst weep
for, has swept the column from the
tomb. The marble was broken by vio-
lent hands, and the shattered sepulchre
of the Prince of Poets gained a dusty
hospitality from the museum of a coun-

PIERRE DE RONSARD 25

try town. Better had been the laurel
of thy desire, the creeping vine, and the
ivy tree.

Scarce more fortunate, for long, than
thy monument was thy memory. Thou
hast not encountered. Master, in the
Paradise of Poets, Messieurs Malherbe,
De Balzac, and Boileau — Boileau who
spoke of thee as Ce poete orgueilleux
trebuche de si haut !

These gallant gentlemen, I make no
doubt, are happy after their own fashion,
backbiting each other and thee in the
Paradise of Critics. In their time they
wrought thee much evil, grumbling
that thou wrotest in Greek and Latin
(of which tongues certain of them had
but little skill), and blaming thy many
lyric melodies and the free flow of thy
lines. What said M. de Balzac to M.
Chapelain } ' M. de Malherbe, M. de
Grasse, and yourself must be very little
poets, if Ronsard 'be a great one.' Time
has brought in his revenges, and Mes-
sieurs Chapelain and De Grasse are as

26 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

well forgotten as thou art well remem-
bered. Men could not always be deaf
to thy sweet old songs, nor blind to
the beauty of thy roses and thy loves.
When they took the wax out of their
ears that M. Boileau had given them
lest they should hear the singing of thy
Sirens, then they were deaf no longer,
then they heard the old deaf poet sing-
ing and made answer to his lays. Hast
thou not heard these sounds } have they
not reached thee, the voices and the
lyres of Theophile Gautier and Alfred
de Musset ? Methinks thou hast marked
them, and been glad that the old notes
were ringing again and the old French
lyric measures tripping to thine ancient
harmonies, echoing and replying to the
Muses of Horace and Catullus. Re-
turning to Nature, poets returned to
thee. Thy monument has perished, but
not thy music, and the Prince of Poets
has returned to his own again in a
glorious Restoration.

Through the dust and smoke of ages.

PIERRE DE RONSARD 27

and through the centuries of wars we
strain our eyes and try to gain a glimpse
of thee, Master, in thy good days, when
the Muses walked with thee. We seem
to mark thee wandering silent through
some little village, or dreaming in the
woods, or loitering among thy lonely
places, or in gardens where the roses
blossom among wilder flowers, or on
river banks where the whispering pop-
lars and sighing reeds make answer to
the murmur of the waters. Such a
picture hast thou drawn of thyself in the
summer afternoons.

Je m'en vais pourmener tantost parmy la plaine,
Tantost en un village, et tantost en un bois,
Et tantost par les lieux solitaires et cois.
J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage,
J'aime le flot de I'eau qui gazouille au rivage.

Still, methinks, there was a book in the
hand of the grave and learned poet ;
still thou wouldst carry thy Horace,
thy Catullus, thy Theocritus, through
the gem-like weather of the Renouveau^
when the woods were enamelled with

28 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

flowers, and the young Spring was
lodged, like a wandering prince, in his
great palaces hung with green :

Orgiieilleux de ses fleurs, enfle de sa jeunesse, '
Loge comme un grand Prince en ses vertes maisons !

Thou sawest, in these woods by Loire
side, the fair shapes of old religion.
Fauns, Nymphs, and Satyrs, and heard'st
in the nightingale's music the plaint
of Philomel. The ancient poets came
back in the train of thyself and of the
Spring, and learning was scarce less
dear to thee than love ; and thy ladies
seemed fairer for the names they bor-
rowed from the beauties of forgotten days,
Helen and Cassandra. How sweetly
didst thou sing to them thine old mo-
rality, and how gravely didst thou
teach the lesson of the Roses ! Well
didst thou know it, well didst thou love
the Rose, since thy nurse, carrying thee,
an infant, to the holy font, let fall on
thee the sacred water brimmed with
floating blossoms of the Rose !

PIERRE DE RONSARD 29

Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose,
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
A point perdu ceste vespree
Les plis de sa robe pourpree,
Et son teint au votre pareil.

And again,

La belle Rose du Printemps,
Aubert, admoneste les hommes
Passer joyeusement le temps,
Et pendant que jeunes nous sommes,
Esbattre la fleur de nos ans.

In the same mood, looking far down
the future, thou sangest of thy lady's
age, the most sad, the most beautiful of
thy sad and beautiful lays ; for if thy
bees gathered much honey 'twas some-
what bitter to taste, like that of the Sar-
dinian yews. How clearly we see the
great hall, the grey lady spinning and
humming among her drowsy maids, and
how they waken at the word, and she
sees her spring in their eyes, and they
forecast their winter in her face, when she
murmurs * 'Twas Ronsard sang of me.'
Winter, and summer, and spring, how

30 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

swiftly they pass, and how early time
brought thee his sorrows, and grief cast
her dust upon thy head.

Adieu ma Lyre, adieu fillettes,
Jadis mes douces amourettes,
Adieu, je sens venir ma fin,
Nul passetemps de ma jeunesse
Ne m'accompagne en la vieillesse.
Que le feu, le lict et le vin.

Wine, and a soft bed, and a bright
fire : to this trinity of poor pleasures we
come soon, if, indeed, wine be left to us.
Poetry herself deserts us ; is it not said
that Bacchus never forgives a renegade ?
and most of us turn recreants to Bac-
chus. Even the bright fire, I fear, was
not always there to warm thine old
blood, Master, or, if fire there were, the
wood was not bought with thy book-
seller's money. When autumn was
drawing in during thine early old age,
in 1584, didst thou not write that thou
hadst never received a sou at the hands
of all the publishers who vended thy
books ? And as thou wert about put-

PIERRE DE RONSARD 31

ting forth thy foHo edition of 1584,
thou didst pray Buon, the bookseller,
to give thee sixty crowns co buy wood
withal, and make thee a bright fire in
winter weather, and comfort thine old
age with thy friend Gallandius. And if
Buon will not pay, then to try the other
booksellers, 'that wish to take everything
and give nothing.'

Was it knowledge of this passage,
Master, or ignorance of everything else,
that made certain of the common stead-
fast dunces of our days speak of thee as
if thou hadst been a starveling, neglected
poetaster, jealous forsooth of Maitre
Frangoys Rabelais ? See how ignorantly
M. Fleury writes, who teaches French
literature withal to them of Muscovy,
and hath indited a Life of Rabelais.
' Rabelais etait revetu d'un emploi
honorable ; Ronsard etait traite en
subalterne,' quoth this wondrous pro-
fessor. What ! Pierre de Ronsard, a
gentleman of a noble house, holding the
revenue of many abbeys, the friend of

32 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Mary Stuart, of the Due d'Orleans, of
Charles IX., he is traite en siibalterne,
and is jealous of a frocked or unfrocked
manant like Maitre Frangoys ! And
then this amazing Fleury falls foul of
thine epitaph on Maitre Frangoys and
cries, ' Ronsard a voulu faire des vers
mechants ; il n'a fait que de mechants
vers,' More truly saith M. Sainte-
Beuve, * If the good Rabelais had re-
turned to Meudon on the day when this
epitaph was made over the wine, he
would, methinks, have laughed heartily.'
But what shall be said of a Professor
like the egregious M. Fleury, who holds
that Ronsard was despised at Court "^
Was there a party at tennis when the
king would not fain have had thee on
his side, declaring that he ever won
when Ronsard was his partner ? Did
he not give thee benefices, and many
priories, and call thee his father in
Apollo, and even, so they say, bid thee
sit down beside him on his throne ?
Away, ye scandalous folk, who tell us

PIERRE DE RONSARD 33

that there was strife between the Prince
of Poets and the King of Mirth. Naught
have ye by way of proof of your slander
but the talk of Jean Bernierj a scurrilous,
starveling apothecary, who put forth his
fables in 1697, a century and a half
after Maitre Fran^oys died. Bayle
quoted this fellow in a note, and ye all
steal the tattle one from another in your
dull manner, and know not whence it
comes, nor even that Bayle would none
of it and mocked its author. With so
little knowledge is history written, and
thus doth each chattering brook of a
' Life ' swell with its tribute ' that great
Mississippi of falsehood,' Biography.

34 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

IV.

To Herodotus.

To Herodotus of Halicarnassus, greet-
ing.— Concerning the matters set forth
in your histories, and the tales you
tell about both Greeks and Barbarians,
whether they be true, or whether they
be false, men dispute not little but a
great deal. Wherefore I, being con-
cerned to know the verity, did set forth
to make search in every manner, and
came in my quest even unto the ends of
the earth. For there is an island of
the Cimmerians beyond the Straits of
Heracles, some three days' voyage to a
ship that hath a fair following wind in
her sails ; and there it is said that men
know many things from of old : thither,
then, I came in my inquiry. Now, the
island is not small, but large, greater

HERODOTUS 35

than the whole of Hellas ; and they call
it Britain. In that island the east wind
blows for ten parts of the year, and the
people know not how to cover them-
selves from the cold. But for the other
two months of the year the sun shines
fiercely, so that some of them die
thereof, and others die of the frozen
mixed drinks ; for they have ice even
in the summer, and this ice they put to
their liquor. Through the whole of this
island, from the west even to the east,
there flows a river called Thames : a
great river and a laborious, but not to
be likened to the River of Egypt.

The mouth of this river, where I
stepped out from my ship, is exceedingly
foul and of an evil savour by reason of
the city on the banks. Now this city
is several hundred parasangs in circum-
ference. Yet a man that needed not to
breathe the air might go round it in one
hour, in chariots that run under the
earth ; and these chariots are drawn by
creatures that breathe smoke and sulphur,

D 2

36 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

such as Orpheus mentions in his 'Argo-
nautica/ if it be by Orpheus. The
people of the town, when I inquired of
them concerning Herodotus of Hali-
carnassus, looked on me with amaze-
ment, and went straightway about their
business — namely, to seek out whatsoever
new thing is coming to pass all over the
whole inhabited world, and as for things
old, they take no keep of them.

Nevertheless, by diligence I learned
that he who in this land knew most
concerning Herodotus was a priest, and
dwelt in the priests' city on the river
which is called the City of the Ford of
the Ox. But whether lo, when she wore
a cow's shape, had passed by that way
in her wanderings, and thence comes the
name of that city, I could not (though I
asked all men I met) learn aught with
certainty. But to me, considering this,
it seemed that lo must have come
thither. And now farewell to lo.

To the City of the Priests there are
two roads : one by land ; and one by

HERODOTUS 37

water, following the river. To a well-
girdled man, the land journey is but
one day's travel ; by the river it is
longer but more pleasant. Now that
river flows, as I said, from the west
to the east. And there is in it a fish
called chub, which they catch ; but they
do not eat it, for a certain sacred reason.
Also there is a fish called trout, and this
is the manner of his catching. They
build for this purpose great dams of
wood, which they call weirs. Having
built the weir they sit upon it with rods
in their hands, and a line on the rod,
and at the end of the line a little fish.
There then they 'sit and spin in the
sun,' as one of their poets says, not for
a short time but for many days, having
rods in their hands and eating and
drinking. In this wise they angle for the
fish called trout ; but whether they ever
catch him or not, not having seen it, I
cannot say ; for it is not pleasant to me
to speak things concerning which I know
not the truth.

38 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Now, after sailing and rowing against
the stream for certain days, I came to
the City of the Ford of the Ox. Here
the river changes his name, and is
called Isis, after the name of the god-
dess of the Egyptians. But whether the
Britons brought the name from Egypt
or whether the Egyptians took it from
the Britons, not knowing I prefer not
to say. But to me it seems that the
Britons are a colony of the Egyptians, or
the Egyptians a colony of the Britons.
Moreover, when I was in Egypt I saw
certain soldiers in white helmets, who
were certainly British. But what they
did there (as Egypt neither belongs to
Britain nor Britain to Egypt) I know
not, neither could they tell me. But
one of them replied to me in that line
of Horner (if the Odyssey be Homer's),
* We have come to a sorry Cyprus, and
a sad Egypt.' Others told me that they
once marched against the Ethiopians,
and having defeated them several times,
then came back again, leaving their

HERODOTUS 39

property to the Ethiopians. But as to
the truth of this I leave it to every man
to form his own opinion.

Having come into the City of the
Priests, I went forth into the street, and
found a priest of the baser sort, who
for a piece of silver led me hither and
thither among the temples, discoursing
of many things.

Now it seemed to me a strange
thing that the city was empty, and no
man dwelling therein, save a few priests
only, and their wives, and their children,
who are drawn to and fro in little
carriages dragged by women. But the
priest told me that during half the year
the city was desolate, for that there came
somewhat called 'The Long,' or 'The
Vac,' and drave out the young priests.
And he said that these did no other
thing but row boats, and throw balls
from one to the other, and this they
were made to do, he said, that the
young priests might learn to be humble,
for they are the proudest of men. But

40 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

whether he spoke truth or not I know-
not, only I set down what he told me.
But to anyone considering it, this ap-
pears rather to jump with his story —
namely, that the young priests have
houses on the river, painted of divers
colours, all of them empty.

Then the priest, at my desire,
brought me to one of the temples, that
I might seek out all things concerning
Herodotus the Halicarnassian, from one
who knew. Now this temple is not the
fairest in the city, but less fair and
goodly than the old temples, yet good-
lier and more fair than the new temples ;
and over the roof there is the image of
an eagle made of stone — no small marvel,
but a great one, how men came to fashion
him ; and that temple is called the House
of Queens. Here they sacrifice a boar
once every year ; and concerning this
they tell a certain sacred story which I
know but will not utter.

Then I was brought to the priest
who had a name for knowing most

HERODOTUS 41

about Egypt, and the Egyptians, and
the Assyrians, and the Cappadocians,
and all the kingdoms of the Great King.
He came out to me, being attired in a
black robe, and wearing on his head a
square cap. But why the priests have
square caps I know, and he who has
been initiated into the mysteries which
they call ' Matric ' knows, but I prefer
not to tell. Concerning the square cap,
then, let this be sufficient. Now, the
priest received me courteously, and when
I asked him, concerning Herodotus,
whether he were a true man or not,
he smiled, and answered 'Abu Goosh,'
which, in the tongue of the Arabians,
means * The Father of Liars.' Then he
went on to speak concerning Herodotus,
and he said in his discourse that Hero-
dotus not only told the thing which was
not, but that he did so wilfully, as one
knowing the truth but concealing it.
For example, quoth he, ' Solon never
went to see Croesus, as Herodotus avers ;
nor did those about Xerxes ever dream

*:y^ OF THK^

^tjitiversity;

42 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

dreams ; but Herodotus, out of his abun-
dant wickedness, invented these things.
*■ Now behold,' he went on, * how the
curse of the Gods falls upon Herodotus.
For he pretends that he saw Cadmeian
inscriptions at Thebes. Now I do not
believe there were any Cadmeian in-
scriptions there : therefore Herodotus is
most manifestly lying. Moreover, this
Herodotus never speaks of Sophocles
the Athenian, and why not } Because
he, being a child at school, did not
learn Sophocles by heart : for the tra-
gedies of Sophocles could not have been
learned at school before they were written,
nor can any man quote a poet whom he
never learned at school. Moreover, as all
those about Herodotus knew Sophocles
well, he could not appear to them to be
learned by showing that he knew what
they knew also.' Then I thought the
priest was making game and sport, say-
ing first that Herodotus could know
no poet whom he had not learned at
school, and then saying that all the men

HERODOTUS 43

of his time well knew this poet, * about
whom everyone was talking.' But the
priest seemed not to know that Herodo-
tus and Sophocles were friends, which is
proved by this, that Sophocles wrote an
ode in praise of Herodotus.

Then he went on, and though I were
to write with a hundred hands (like
Briareus, of whom Homer makes men-
tion) I could not tell you all the things
that the priest said against Herodotus,
speaking truly, or not truly, or sometimes
correctly and sometimes not, as often
befalls mortal men. For Herodotus, he
said, was chiefly concerned to steal the
lore of those who came before him, such
as Hecatseus, and then to escape notice
as having stolen it. Also he said that,
being himself cunning and deceitful,
Herodotus was easily beguiled by the
cunning of others, and believed in things
manifestly false, such as the story of
the Phoenix-bird.

Then I spoke, and said that Hero-
dotus himself declared that he could

44 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

not believe that story ; but the priest
regarded me not. And he said that
Herodotus had never caught a crocodile
with cold pig, nor did he ever visit
Assyria, nor Babylon, nor Elephantine ;
but, saying that he had been in these
lands, said that which was not true.
He also declared that Herodotus, when
he travelled, knew none of the Fat Ones
of the Egyptians, but only those of the
baser sort. And he called Herodotus a
thief and a beguiler, and ' the same with
intent to deceive,' as one of their own
poets writes.- And, to be short, Herodotus,
I could not tell you in one day all the
charges which are now brought against
you ; but concerning the truth of these
things, you know, not least, but most,
as to yourself being guilty or innocent
Wherefore, if you have anything to show
or set forth whereby you may be relieved
from the burden of these accusations,
now is the time. Be no longer silent ;
but, whether through the Oracle of
the Dead, or the Oracle of Branchidae,

HERODOTUS 45

or that in Delphi, or Dodona, or of
Amphiaraus at Oropus, speak to your
friends and lovers (whereof I am one from
of old) and let men know the very truth.

Now, concerning the priests in the
City of the Ford of the Ox, it is to be
said that of all men whom we know they
receive strangers most gladly, feasting
them all day. Moreover, they have
many drinks, cunningly mixed, and of
these the best is that they call Arch-
deacon, naming it from one of the priests'
offices. Truly, as Homer says (if the
Odyssey be Homer's), 'when that draught
is poured into the bowl then it is no
pleasure to refrain.'

Drinking of this wine, or nectar,
Herodotus,! pledge you, and pour forth
some deal on the ground, to Herodotus
of Halicarnassus, in the House of Hades.

And I wish you farewell, and good
be with you. Whether the priest spoke
truly, or not truly, even so may such
good things betide you as befall dead
men.

46 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

V.

Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope,

From mortal Gratitude, decide, my Pope,

Have Wits Immortal more to fear or
hope ?

Wits toil and travail round the Plant of
Fame,

Their Works its Garden, and its Growth
their Aim,

Then Commentators, in unwieldy
Dance,

Break down the Barriers of the trim
Pleasance,

Pursue the Poet, like Actaeon's Hounds,

Beyond the fences of his Garden
Grounds,

Rend from the singing Robes each bor-
rowed Gem,

Rend from the laurel'd Brows the Dia-
dem,

POPE 47

And, if one Rag of Character they

spare,
Comes the Biographer, and strips it

bare!

Such, Pope, has been thy Fortune, such

thy Doom.
Swift the Ghouls gathered at the Poet's

Tomb,
With Dust of Notes to clog each lordly

Line,
Warburton, Warton, Croker, Bowles,

combine !
Collecting Cackle, Johnson conde-
scends
To interview the Drudges of your

Friends.
Thus though your Courthope holds your

merits high.
And still proclaims your Poems Poetry^
Biographers, un - Boswell - like, have

sneered,
And Dunces edit him whom Dunces
feared !

48 LETTJ^RS TO DEAD AUTHORS

They say, * what say they ? ' Not in vain

You ask ;
To tell you what they say, behold my

Task!
* Methinks already I your Tears survey '
As I repeat 'the horrid Things they say.''

Comes El — n first : I fancy you'll agree
Not frenzied Dennis smote so fell as

he;
For El — n's Introduction, crabbed and

dry,
Like Churchill's Cudgel's ^ marked with

Lie^ and Lie !

' Too dull to know what his own System

meant.
Pope yet was skilled new Treasons to

invent ;
A Snake that puffed himself and stung

his Friends,
Few Lied so frequent, for such little

Ends ;

' Rape of the Lock.

* In Mr. Hogarth's Caricatura.

POPE 49

His mind, like Flesh inflamed,' was raw

and sore.
And still, the more he writhed, he stung

the more !
Oft in a Quarrel, never in the

Right,
His Spirit sank when he was called

to fight.
Pope, in the Darkness mining like a

Mole,
Forged on Himself, as from Himself he

stole,
And what for Caryll once he feigned to

feel.
Transferred, in Letters never sent, to

Steele !
Still he denied the Letters he had

writ.
And still mistook Indecency for Wit.
His very Grammar, so De Quincey

cries,
" Detains the Reader, and at times

defies ! " '

* Elwin's Pope, ii. 15.

E

50 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Fierce El — n thus : no Line escapes his

Rage,
And furious Foot-notes growl 'neath

every Page :
See St-ph-n next take up the woful

Tale,
Prolong the Preaching, and protract the

Wail !
' Some forage Falsehoods from the

North and South,
But Pope, poor D 1, lied from Hand

to Mouth ; 1
Affected, hypocritical, and vain,
A Book in Breeches, and a Fop in

Grain ;
A Fox that found not the high Clusters

sour.
The Fanfaron of Vice beyond his

power,
Pope yet possessed ' — (the Praise will

make you start) —
' Mean, morbid, vain, he yet possessed

a Heart !

' ' Poor Pope was always a hand-to-mouth liar.' —
Pope, by Leslie Stephen, 139.

POPE 51

And still we marvel at the Man, and
still

Admire his Finish, and applaud his
Skill :

Though, as that fabled Barque, a phan-
tom Form,

Eternal strains, nor rounds the Cape of
Storm,

Even so Pope strove, nor ever crossed
the Line.

That from the Noble separates the
Fine ! '

The Learned thus, and who can quite

reply.
Reverse the Judgment, and Retort the

Lie?
You reap, in armed Hates that haunt

your Name,
Reap what you sowed, the Dragon's

Teeth of Fame :
You could not write, and from unen-

vious Time
Expect the Wreath that crowns the lofty

Rhyme,

E 2

52 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

You Still must fight, retreat, attack

defend.
And oft, to snatch a Laurel, lose a

Friend !

The Pity of it ! And the changing

Taste
Of changing Time leaves half your Work

a Waste !
My Childhood fled your Couplet's clarion

tone,
And sought for Homer in the Prose of

Bohn.
Still through the Dust of that dim Prose

appears
The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of

Spears ;
Still we may trace what Hearts heroic

feel,
And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the

Steel !
But, ah, your Iliad seems a half-pre-
tence,
Where Wits, not Heroes, prove their

Skill in Fence,

POPE S3

And great Achilles' Eloquence doth

show
As if no Centaur trained him, but Boi-

leau !

Again, your Verse is orderly, — and

more, —
' The Waves behind impel the Waves

before ; '
Monotonously musical they glide.
Till Couplet unto Couplet hath replied.
But turn to Homer ! How his Verses

sweep !
Surge answers Surge and Deep doth call

on Deep ;
This Line in Foam and Thunder issues

forth.
Spurred by the West or smitten by the

North,
Sombre in all its sullen Deeps, and all
Clear at the Crest, and foaming to the

Fall,
The next with silver Murmur dies away.
Like Tides that falter to Calypso's

Bay!

54 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Thus Time, with sordid Alchemy and

dread,
Turns half the Glory of your Gold to

Lead ;
Thus Time, — at Ronsard's wreath that

vainly bit, —
Has marred the Poet to preserve the
• Wit,

Who almost left on Addison a stain,
Whose Knife cut cleanest with a poi-
soned pain, —
Yet Thou (strange Fate that clings to

all of Thine !)
When most a Wit dost most a Poet

shine.
In Poetry thy Dunciad expires,
When Wit has shot ' her momentary

Fires.'
'Tis Tragedy that watches by the Bed
* Where tawdry Yellow strove with

dirty Red,'
And Men, remembering all, can scarce

deny
To lay the Laurel where thine Ashes

lie!

55

VI.

To Lucian of Sarnosata.

In what bower, oh Lucian, of your
rediscovered Islands Fortunate are you
now reclining ; the delight of the fair,
the learned, the witty, and the brave ?
In that clear and tranquil climate, whose
air breathes of * violet and lily, myrtle,
and the flower of the vine,'

Where the daisies are rose-scented.
And the Rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not,

among the music of all birds, and the
wind-blown notes of flutes hanging on the
trees, methinks that your laughter sounds
most silvery sweet, and that Helen and
fair Charmides are still of your company.
Master of mirth, and Soul the best con-
tented of all that have seen the world's
ways clearly, most clear-sighted of all

S6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

that have made tranquillity their bride,
what other laughers dwell with you,
where the crystal and fragrant waters
wander round the shining palaces and
the temples of amethyst ?

Heine surely is with you ; if, indeed,
it was not one Syrian soul that dwelt
among alien men, Germans and Romans,
in the bodily tabernacles of Heine and of
Lucian. But he was fallen on evil times
and evil tongues ; while Lucian, as witty
as he, as bitter in mockery, as happily
dowered with the magic of words, lived
long and happily and honoured, im-
prisoned in no ' mattress-grave.' With-
out Rabelais, without Voltaire, without
Heine, you would find, methinks, even
the joys of your Happy Islands lacking
in zest ; and, unless Plato came by your
way, none of the ancients could meet you
in the lists of sportive dialogue.

There, among the vines that bear
twelve times in the year, more excellent
than all the vineyards of Touraine, while
the song-birds bring you flowers from

LUCIAN OF S AMOS ATA 57

vales enchanted, and the shapes of the
Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind-
woven raiment of sunset hues ; there, in
a land that knows not age, nor winter,
midnight, nor autumn, nor noon, where
the silver twilight of summer-dawn is
perennial, where youth does not wax
spectre-pale and die ; there, my Lucian,
you are crowned the Prince of the Para-
dise of Mirth.

Who would bring you, if he had the
power, from the banquet where Homer
sings : Homer, who, in mockery of com-
mentators, past and to come, German
and Greek, informed you that he was by
birth a Babylonian ? Yet, if you, who
first wrote Dialogues of the Dead, could
hear the prayer of an epistle wafted to
' lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of
West,' you might visit once more a world
so worthy of such a mocker, so like the
world you knew so well of old.

Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of
your sense and of your mockery ! Here,
where faith is sick and superstition is

58 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

waking afresh ; where gods come rarely,
and spectres appear at five shiUings an
interview ; where science is popular, and
philosophy cries aloud in the market-
place, and clamour does duty for govern-
ment, and Thais and Lais are names
of power — here, Lucian, is room and
scope for you. Can I not imagine
a new ' Auction of Philosophers,' and
what wealth might be made by him who
bought these popular sages and lecturers
at his estimate, and vended them at
their own ?

Hermes : Whom shall we put first
up to auction ?

Zeus : That German in spectacles ;
he seems a highly respectable man.

Hermes : Ho, Pessimist, come down
and let the public view you.

Zeus : Go on, put him up and have
done with him.

Hermes : Who bids for the Life
Miserable, for extreme, complete, per-
fect, unredeemable perdition t What
offers for the universal extinction of the

LUCIAN OF S AMOS ATA 59

Species, and the collapse of the Con-
scious ?

A Purchaser : He does not look
at all a bad lot. May one put him
through his paces ?

Hermes : Certainly ; try your
luck.

Purchaser : What is your name ?

Pessimist: Hartmann.

Purchaser : What can you teach
me?

Pessimist : That Life is not worth
Living.

Purchaser : Wonderful ! Most
edifying ! How much for this lot ?

Hermes : Two hundred pounds.

Purchaser : I will write you a
cheque for the money. Come home,
Pessimist, and begin your lessons with-
out more ado.

Hermes : Attention ! Here is a
magnificent article — the Positive Life,
the Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life.
Who bids for a possible place in the
Calendar of the Future ?

6o LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Purchaser : What does he call him-
self ? he has a very French air.

Hermes : Put your own ques-
tions.

Purchaser : What's your pedigree,
my Philosopher, and previous perform-
ances ?

POSITIVIST : I am by Rousseau out
of Catholicism, with a strain of the
Evolution blood.

Purchaser : What do you believe
in?

POSITIVIST : In Man, with a large M.

Purchaser : Not in individual
Man.?

POSITIVIST : By no means ; not even
always in Mr. Gladstone. All men, all
Churches, all parties, all philosophies,
and even the other sect of our own
Church, are perpetually in the wrong.
Buy me, and listen to me, and you will
always be in the right.

Purchaser : And, after this life,
what have you to offer me ?

POSITIVIST: A distinguished posi-

LUCIAN OF SA MO SAT A 6i

tion in the Choir Invisible ; but not, of
course, conscious immortality.

Purchaser : Take him away, and
put up another lot.

Then the Hegelian, with his Notion,
and the Darwinian, with his notions,
and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church
mixture of Religion and Evolution,
and the Spencerian, with that Absolute
which is a sort of a something, might
all be offered with their divers wares ;
and cheaply enough, Lucian, you would
value them in this auction of Sects.
' There is but one way to Corinth,' as
of old ; but which that way may be,
oh master of Hermotimus, we know no
more than he did of old ; and still we
find, of all philosophies, that the Stoic
route is most to be recommended. But we
have our Cyrenaics too, though they are
no longer ' clothed in purple, and crowned
with flowers, and fond of drink and of
female flute-players.' Ah, here too, you
might laugh, and fail to see where the
Pleasure lies, when the Cyrenaics are no

62 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

'judges of cakes' (nor of ale, for that
matter), and are strangers in the Courts
of Princes. ' To despise all things, to
make use of all things, in all things to
follow pleasure only : ' that is not the
manner of the new, if it were the secret
of the older Hedonism.

Then, turning from the philosophers
to the seekers after a sign, what change,
Lucian, would you find in them and
their ways ? None ; they are quite un-
altered. Still our Peregrinus, and our
Peregrina too, come to us from the East,
or, if from the West, they take India on
their way — India, that secular home ot
drivelling creeds, and of religion in its
sacerdotage. Still they prattle of Brah-
mins and Buddhism ; though, unlike
Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn
themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs,
after the Derby. We are not so fortunate
in the demise of our Theosophists ; and
our police, less wise than the Helleno-
dicse, would probably not permit the
Immolation of the Quack. Like your

LUCIAN OF S AMOS AT A 63

Alexander, they deal in marvels and
miracles, oracles and warnings. All
such bogy stories as those of your
' Philopseudes,' and the ghost of the
lady who took to table-rapping because
one of her best slippers had not been
burned with her body, are gravely inves-
tigated by the Psychical Society.

Even your ignorant Bibliophile is
still with us-- the man without a tinge
of letters, who buys up old manuscripts
' because they are stained and gnawed,
and who goes, for proof of valued anti-
quity, to the testimony of the book-
worms.' And the rich Bibliophile now,
as in your satire, clothes his volumes in
purple morocco and gay dortires, while
their contents are sealed to him.

As to the topics of satire and gay
curiosity which occupy the lady known
as ' Gyp,' and M. Halevy in his ' Les
Petites Cardinal,' if you had not ex-
hausted the matter in your ' Dialogues of
Hetairai,' you would be amused to find
the same old traits surviving- without a

64 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

touch of change. One reads, in Halevy's
French, of Madame Cardinal, and, in
your Greek, of the mother of Philinna,
and marvels that eighteen hundred years
have not in one single trifle altered the
mould. Still the old shabby light-loves,
the old greed, the old luxury and squalor.
Still the unconquerable superstition that
now seeks to tell fortunes by the cards,
and, in your time, resorted to the sor-
ceress with her magical ' bull-roarer ' or
turndun}

Yes, Lucian, we are the same vain
creatures of doubt and dread, of unbelief
and credulity, of avarice and pretence,
that you knew, and at whom you smiled.
Nay, our very * social question ' is not
altered. Do you not write, in ' The
Runaways,' ' The artisans will abandon
their workshops, and leave their trades,
when they see that, with all the labour
that bows their bodies from dawn to

' The Greek p6iJ.^os, mentioned by Lucian and
Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Austra-
lians— the turndun.

LUCIAN OF S AMOS ATA 65

dark, they make a petty and starveling
pittance, while men that toil not nor
spin are floating in Pactolus ' ?

They begin to see this again as of
yore ; but whether the end of their vision
will be a laughing matter, you, fortunate
Lucian, do not need to care. Hail to
you, and farewell !

66 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

VII.

To Mattre Frmi^oys Rabelais.

OF THE COMING OF THE COQCIGRUES.

Master, — In the Boreal and Sep-
tentrional lands, turned aside from the
noonday and the sun, there dwelt of old
(as thou knowest, and as Olaus voucheth)
a race of men, brave, strong, nimble, and
adventurous, who had no other care but
to fight and drink. There, by reason
of the cold (as Virgil witnesseth), men
break wine with axes. To their minds,
when once they were dead and gotten
to Valhalla, or the place of their Gods,
there would be no other pleasure but
to swig, tipple, drink, and boose till
the coming of that last darkness and
Twilight, wherein they, with their deities,
should do battle against the enemies of

RABELAIS 6j

all mankind ; which day they rather
desired than dreaded.

So chanced it also with Pantagruel
and Brother John and their company,
after they had once partaken of the
secret of the Dive Bouteille. Thereafter
they searched no longer ; but, abiding
at their ease, were merry, frolic, jolly,
gay, glad, and wise ; only that they
always and ever did expect the awful
Coming of the Coqcigrues. Now con-
cerning the day of that coming, and the
nature of them that should come, they
knew nothing ; and for his part Panurge
was all the more adread, as Aristotle
testifieth that men (and Panurge above
others) most fear that which they know
least. Now it chanced one day, as they
sat at meat, with viands rare, dainty, and
precious as ever Apicius dreamed of,
that there fluttered on the air a faint
sound as of sermons, speeches, orations,
addresses, discourses, lectures, and the
like ; whereat Panurge, pricking up his
ears, cried, ' Methinks this wind bloweth

F 2

68 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

from Midlothian,' and so fell a trem-
bling.

Next, to their aural orifices, and the
avenues audient of the brain, was borne
a very melancholy sound as of harmo-
niums, hymns, organ-pianos, psalteries,
and the like, all playing different airs, in
a kind most hateful to the Muses. Then
said Panurge, as well as he might for
the chattering of his teeth : ' May I never
drink if here come not the Coqcigrues ! '
and this saying and prophecy of his
was true and inspired. But thereon the
others began to mock, flout, and gird at
Panurge for his cowardice. ' Here am
I ! ' cried Brother John, * well-armed and
ready to stand a siege ; being entrenched,
fortified, hemmed -in and surrounded
with great pasties, huge pieces of salted
beef, salads, fricassees, hams, tongues,
pies, and a wilderness of pleasant little
tarts, jellies, pastries, trifles, and fruits of
all kinds, and I shall not. thirst while
I have good wells, founts, springs, and
sources of Bordeaux wine. Burgundy,

RABELAIS 69

wine of the Champagne country, sack
and Canary. A fig for thy Coqcigrues ! '

But even as he spoke there ran up
suddenly a whole legion, or rather army,
of physicians, each armed with laryngo-
scopes, stethoscopes, horoscopes, micro-
scopes, weighing machines, and such other
tools, engines, and arms as they had who,
after thy time, persecuted Monsieur de
Pourceaugnac ! And they all, rushing
on Brother John, cried out to him, ' Ab-
stain ! Abstain ! ' And one said, ' I have
well diagnosed thee, and thou art in a
fair way to have the gout.' ' I never did
better in my days,' said Brother John.
' Away with thy meats and drinks ! '
they cried. And one said, ' He must
to Royat ; ' and another, ' Hence with
him to Aix ; ' and a third, ' Banish him
to Wiesbaden ; ' and a fourth, ' Hale him
to Gastein ; ' and yet another, * To Bar-
bouille with him in chains ! '

And while others felt his pulse and
looked at his tongue, they all wrote pre-
scriptions for him like men mad. ' For

70 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

thy eating/ cried he that seemed to be
their leader, * No soup ! ' ' No soup ! '
quoth Brother John ; and those cheeks
of his, whereat you might have warmed
your two hands in the winter solstice,
grew white as lilies. ' Nay ! and no
salmon, nor any beef nor mutton ! A
little chicken by times, but pe^^iculo tuo!
Nor any game, such as grouse, partridge,
pheasant, capercailzie, wild duck ; nor
any cheese, nor fruit, nor pastry, nor
coffee, nor eaic de vie ; and avoid all
sweets. No veal, pork, nor made dishes
of any kind.' ' Then what may I eat ? '
quoth the good Brother, whose valour
bad oozed out of the soles of his sandals.
'A little cold bacon at breakfast — no
eggs,' quoth the leader of the strange
folk, 'and a slice of toast without
butter.' ' And for thy drink '— (' What t '
gasped Brother John)— 'one dessert-
spoonful of whisky, with a pint of the
water of ApoUinaris at luncheon and
dinner. No more ! ' At this Brother
John fainted, falling like a great buttress

RABELAIS 71

of a hill, such as Taygetus or Eryman-
thus.

While they were busy with him,
others of the frantic folk had built great
platforms of wood, whereon they all
stood and spoke at once, both men and
women. And of these some wore red
crosses on their garments, which mean-
eth ' Salvation ; ' and others wore white
crosses, with a little black button of
crape, to signify * Purity ; ' and others
bits of blue to mean * Abstinence.'
While some of these pursued Panurge
others did beset Pantagruel ; asking him
very long questions, whereunto he gave
but short answers. Thus they asked : —

Have ye Local Option here i* —
Pan. : What ?

May one man drink if his neighbour
be not athirst ? — Pan. : Yea !

Have ye Free Education ? — Pan. :
What?

Must they that have, pay to school
them that have not ? — Pan. : Nay !

Have ye free land ? — Pan. : What ?

72 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Have ye taken the land from the
farmer, and given it to the tailor out of
work and the candlemaker masterless ?
— Pan. : Nay !

Have your women folk votes? —
Pan.: Bosh!

Have ye got religion ? — Pan.: How?

Do you go about the streets at
night, brawling, blowing a trumpet be-
fore you, and making long prayers i* —
Pan.: Nay!

Have you manhood suffrage ? — Pan. :
Eh?

Is Jack as good as his master? —
Pan. : Nay I

Have you joined the Arbitration
Society } — Pan. : Quoy ?

Will you let another kick you, and
will you ask his neighbour if you de-
serve the same } — Pan. : Nay !

Do you eat what you list ? — Pan. :
Ay!

Do you drink when you are athirst ?
—Pan. : Ay !

Are you governed by the free ex-

RABELAIS 73

pression of the popular will ? — Pan. :
How ?

Are you servants of priests, pulpits,
and penny papers ? — Pan. : No !

Now, when they heard these answers
of Pantagruel they all fell, some a weep-
ing, some a praying, some a swearing,
some an arbitrating, some a lecturing,
some a caucussing, some a preaching,
some a faith-healing, some a miracle-
working, som.e a hypnotising, some a writ-
ing to the daily press ; and while they
were thus busy, like folk distraught, ' re-
forming the island,' Pantagruel burst
out a laughing ; whereat they were
greatly dismayed ; for laughter killeth
the whole race of Coqcigrues, and they
may not endure it.

Then Pantagruel and his company
stole aboard a barque that Panurge had
ready in the harbour. And having pro-
visioned her well with store of meat and
good drink, they set sail for the kingdom
of Entelechy, where, having landed, they
were kindly entreated ; and there, abide

74 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

to this day ; drinking of the sweet and
eating of the fat, under the protection
of that intellectual sphere which hath in
all places its centre and nowhere its cir-
cumference.

Such was their destiny ; there was
their end appointed, and thither the
Coqcigrues can never come. For all the
air of that land is full of laughter, which
killeth Coqcigrues ; and there aboundeth
the herb Pantagruelion. But for thee,
Master Frangoys, thou art not well liked
in this island of ours, where the Coq-
cigrues are abundant, very fierce, cruel,
and tyrannical. Yet thou hast thy
friends, that meet and drink to thee, and
wish thee well wheresoever thou hast
found thy grand peut-etre.

75

VIII.

To Jane Austen.

Madam, — If to the enjoyments of
your present state be lacking a view of the
minor infirmities or foibles of men, I can-
not but think (were the thought permitted )
that your pleasures are yet incomplete.
Moreover, it is certain that a woman of
parts who has once meddled with litera-
ture will never wholly lose her love for
the discussion of that delicious topic,
nor cease to relish what (in the cant of
our new age) is styled * literary shop.'
For these reasons I attempt to convey to
you some inkling of the present state
of that agreeable art which you, madam,
raised to its highest pitch of perfection.

As to your own works (immortal, as
I believe), I have but little that is wholly
cheering to tell one who, among women

76 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

of letters, was almost alone in her free-
dom from a lettered vanity. You are
not a very popular author : your volumes
are not found in gaudy covers on every
bookstall ; or, if found, are not perused
with avidity by the Emmas and Cathe-
rines of our generation. 'Tis not long
since a blow was dealt (in the estimation
of the unreasoning) at your character as
an author by the publication of your
familiar letters. The editor of these
epistles, unfortunately, did not always
take your witticisms, and he added others
which were too unmistakably his own.
While the injudicious were disappointed
by the absence of your exquisite style
and humour, the wiser sort were the
more convinced of your wisdom. In
your letters (knowing your correspond-
ents) you gave but the small personal
talk of the hour, for them sufficient ; for
your books you reserved matter and ex-
pression which are imperishable. Your
admirers, if not very numerous, include
all persons of taste, who, in your favour,

JANE AUSTEN 77

are apt somewhat to abate the rule, or
shake off the habit, which commonly
confines them to but temperate lauda-
tion.

Tis the fault of all art to seem anti-
quated and faded in the eyes of the suc-
ceeding generation. The manners of
your age were not the manners of to- day,
and young gentlemen and ladies who
think Scott 'slow,' think Miss Austen
* prim ' and ' dreary.' Yet, even could
you return among us, I scarcely believe
that, speaking the language of the hour,
as you might, and versed in its habits,
you would win the general admiration.
For how tame, madam, are your charac-
ters, especially your favourite heroines !
how limited the life which you knew
and described ! how narrow the range of
your incidents ! how correct your gram-
mar !

As heroines, for example, you chose
ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth, and
Catherine : women remarkable neither
for the brilliance nor for the degradation

78 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

of their birth ; women wrapped up in their
own and the parish's concerns, ignorant
of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted
with vain yearnings and interesting
doubts. Who can engage his fancy with
their match-makings and the conduct of
their affections, when so many daring
and dazzHng heroines approach and
solicit his regard ?

Here are princesses dressed in white
velvet stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys
— ladies with hearts of ice and lips of
fire, who count their roubles by the mil-
lion, their lovers by the score, and even
their husbands, very often, in figures of
some arithmetical importance. With
these are the immaculate daughters of
itinerant Italian musicians — maids whose
souls are unsoiled amidst the contamina-
tions of our streets, and whose acquaint-
ance with the art of Phidias and Praxi-
teles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the
more admirable, because entirely derived
from loving study of the inexpensive col-
lections vended by the plaster-of-Paris

JANE AUSTEN 79

man round the corner. When such
h'eroines are wooed by the nephews of
Dukes, where are your Emmas and
Elizabeths ? Your volumes neither ex-
cite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked
by that modern and scientific fiction,
which is greatly admired, I learn, in the
United States, as well as in France and
at home.

You erred, it cannot be denied, with
your eyes open. Knowing Lydia and
Kitty so intimately as you did, why did
you make of them almost insignificant
characters ? With Lydia for a heroine
you might have gone far ; and, had you
devoted three volumes, and the chief of
your time, to the passions of Kitty, you
might have held your own, even now, in
the circulating library. How Lyddy,
perched on a corner of the roof, first
beheld her Wickham ; how, on her chal-
lenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her
side ; how they kissed, caressed, swung
on gates together, met at odd seasons, in
strange places, and finally eloped : all

8o LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

this might have been put in the mouth
of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth,
and you would not have been less popu-
lar than several favourites of our time.
Had you cast the whole narrative into
the present tense, and lingered lovingly
over the thickness of Mary's legs and
the softness of Kitty's cheeks, and the
blonde fluffiness of Wickham's whiskers,
you would have left a romance still dear
to young ladies.

Or, again, you might entrance fair
students still, had you concentrated your
attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped
with Henry Crawford. These should
have been the chief figures of ' Mansfield
Park.' But you timidly decline to tackle
Passion. ' Let other pens,' you write,
' dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such
odious subjects as soon as I can.' Ah,
there is the secret of your failure ! Need
I add that the vulgarity and narrowness
of the social circles you describe impair
your popularity ? I scarce remember
more than one lady of title, and but very

JANE AUSTEN 8t

few lords (and these unessential) in all
your tales. Now, when we all wish to
be in society, we demand plenty of titles
in our novels, at any rate, and we get
lords (and very queer lords) even from
Republican authors, born in a country
which in your time was not renowned
for its literature. I have heard a critic
remark, with a decided air of fashion, on
the brevity of the notice which your
characters give each other when they
offer invitations to dinner. ' An invita-
tion to dinner next day was despatched,'
and this demonstrates that your ac-
quaintance 'went out' very little, and
had but few engagements. How vulgar,
too, is one of your heroines, who bids
Mr. Darcy ' keep his breath to cool his
porridge.' I blush for Elizabeth ! It were
superfluous to add that your characters
are debased by being invariably mere
members of the Church of England as
by law established. The Dissenting en-
thusiast, the open soul that glides from

G

82 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation
Army, and from the Higher Pantheism
to the Higher Paganism, we look for in
vain among your studies of character.
Nay, the very words I employ are of un-
known sound to you ; so how can you
help us in the stress of the soul's travail-
ings ?

You may say that the soul's travail-
ings are no affair of yours ; proving
thereby that you have indeed but a
lowly conception of the duty of the
novelist. I only remember one reference,
in all your works, to that controversy
which occupies the chief of our atten-
tion— the great controversy on Creation
or Evolution. Your Jane Bennet cries :
' I have no idea of there being so much
Design in the world as some persons
imagine.' Nor do you touch on our
mighty social question, the Land Laws,
save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a
Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against
the cruelty ' of settling an estate away

JANE AUSTEN %z

from a family of five daughters, In favour
of a man whom nobody cared anything
about.' There, madam, in that cruelly
unjust performancie, what a text you had
for a tendenz-rontanz. Nay, you can allow
Kitty to report that a Private had been
flogged, without introducing a chapter on
Flogging in the Army. But you for-
mally declined to stretch your matter out,
here and there, * with solemn specious
nonsense about something unconnected
with the story.' No ' padding ' for Miss
Austen ! In fact, madam, as you were
born before Analysis came in, or Passion,
or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irrever-
ence, or Religious Open-mindedness, you
really cannot hope to rival your literary
sisters in the minds of a perplexed
generation. Your heroines are not pas-
sionate, we do not see their red wet
cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the
manner of our frank young Maenads.
What says your best successor, a lady
who adds fresh lustre to a name that

G 2

84 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

in fiction equals yours ? She says of Miss
Austen : * Her heroines have a stamp
of their own. They have a certain geritle
self-respect and humour ajid hardness of
heart. . . . Love with them does not
mean a passion as much as an interest,
deep and silent' I think one prefers
them so, and that Englishwomen should
be more like Anne Elliot than Maggie
TuUiver. ' All the privilege I claim for
my own sex is that of loving longest
when existence or when hope is gone,'
said Anne ; perhaps she insisted on a
monopoly that neither sex has all to
itself. Ah, madam, what a relief it is to
come back to your witty volumes, and
forget the follies of to-day in those of
Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet ! How
fine, nay, how noble is your art in its
delicate reserve, never insisting, never
forcing the note, never pushing the sketch
into the caricature ! You worked, with-
out thinking of it, in the spirit of Greece,
on a labour happily limited, and exqui-

JANE AUSTEN 85

sitely organised. * Dear books,' we say,
with Miss Thackeray — * dear books,
bright, sparkling with wit and anima-
tion, in which the homely heroines
charm, the dull hours fly, and the very
bores are enchanting.'

86 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

IX.

To Master Isaak Walto7i.

Father Isaak, — When I would be
quiet and go angling it is my custom
to carry in my wallet thy pretty book,
' The Compleat Angler.' Here, methinks,
if I find not trout I shall find content,
and good company, and sweet songs,
fair milkmaids, and country mirth. For
you are to know that trout be now scarce,
and whereas he was ever a fearful fish,
he hath of late become so wary that
none but the cunningest anglers may be
even with him.

It is not as it was in your time.
Father, when a man might leave his
shop in Fleet Street, of a holiday, and,
when he had stretched his legs up Tot-
tenliam Hill, come lightly to meadows
chequered with waterlilies and lady-

ISAAK WALTON 87

smocks, and so fall to his sport Nay,
now have the houses so much increased,
like a spreading sore (through the
breaking of that excellent law of the
Conscientious King and blessed Martyr,
whereby building beyond the walls was
forbidden), that the meadows are all
swallowed up in streets. And as to the
River Lea, wherein you took many a
good trout, I read in the news sheets
that * its bed is many inches thick
in horrible filth, and the air for more
than half a mile on each side of it
is polluted with a horrible, sickening
stench,' so that we stand in dread of
a new Plague, called the Cholera.
And so it is all about London for
many miles, and if a man, at heavy
charges, betake himself to the fields, lo
you, folk are grown so greedy that
none will suffer a stranger to fish in his
water.

So poor anglers are in sore straits.
Unless a man be rich and can pay great
rents, he may not fish in England, and

88 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

hence spring the discontents of the times,
for the angler is full of content, if he do
but take trout, but if he be driven from
the waterside, he falls, perchance, into
evil company, and cries out to divide
the property of the gentle folk. As
many now do, even among Parliament-
men, whom you loved not, Father Isaak,
neither do I love them more than
Reason and Scripture bid each of us
be kindly to his neighbour. But, be-
hold, the causes of the ill content are
not yet all expressed, for even where a
man hath licence to fish, he will hardly
take trout in our age, unless he be all
the more cunning. For the fish, harried
this way and that by so many of your
disciples, is exceeding shy and artful,
nor will he bite at a fly unless it falleth
lightly, just above his- mouth, and floateth
dry over him, for all the world like the
natural epJiemeris And we may no
longer angle with worm for him, nor
with penk or minnow, nor with the
natural fly, as was your manner, but

ISAAK WALTON 89

only with the artificial, for the more
difficulty the more diversion. For my
part I may cry, like Viator in your
book, * Master, I can neither catch with
the first nor second Angle : I have no
fortune.'

So we fare in England, but some-
what better north of the Tweed, where
trout are less wary, but for the most
part small, except in the extreme rough
north, among horrid hills and lakes.
Thither, Master, as methinks you may
remember, went Richard Franck, that
called himself PhilantJiropus^ and was,
as it were, the Columbus of anglers, dis-
covering for them a new Hyperborean
world. But Franck, doubtless, is now
an angler in the Lake of Darkness, with
Nero and other tyrants, for he followed
after Cromwell, the man of blood, in the
old riding days. How wickedly doth
Franck boast of that leader of the giddy
multitude, ' when they raged, and be-
came restless to find out misery for
themselves and others, and the rabble

90 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

would herd themselves together,' as you
said, * and endeavour to govern and act
in spite of authority.' So you wrote ;
and what said Franck, that recreant
angler ? Doth he not praise ' Ireton,
Vane, Nevill, and Martin, and the most
renowned, valorous, and victorious con-
queror, Oliver Cromwell ' ? Natheless,
with all his sins on his head, this
Franck discovered Scotland for anglers,
and my heart turns to him when he praises
'the glittering and resolute streams of
Tweed.'

In those wilds of Assynt and Loch
Rannoch, Father, we, thy followers, may
yet take trout, and forget the evils of
the times. But, to be done with Franck,
how harshly he speaks of thee and thy
book. ' For you may dedicate your
opinion to what scribbling putationer you
please ; the Compleat Angler if you will,
who tells you of a tedious fly story,
extravagantly collected from antiquated
authors, such as Gesner and Dubravius.'
Again he speaks of ' Isaac Walton,

ISAAK WALTON 91

whose authority to me seems alike au-
thentick, as is the general opinion of
the vulgar prophet,' &c.

Certain I am that Franck, if a better
angler than thou, was a worse man, who,
writing his ' Dialogues Piscatorial ' or
' Northern Memoirs ' five years after the
world welcomed thy * Compleat Angler,'
was jealous of thy favour with the
people, and, may be, hated thee for thy
loyalty and sound faith. But, Master,
like a peaceful man avoiding conten-
tion, thou didst never answer this
blustering Franck, but wentest quietly
about thy quiet Lea, and left him
his roaring Brora and windy Assynt.
How could this noisy man know thee
— and know thee he did, having ar-
gued with thee in Stafford — and not
love Isaak Walton ? A pedant angler,
I call him, a plaguy angler, so let
him huff away, and turn we to thee
and to thy sweet charm in fishing for
men.

How often, studying in thy book,

92 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

have I hummed to myself that of Ho-
race—

Laudis amove tumes ? Sunt certa piacula qua te
Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.

So healing a book for the frenzy of
fame is thy discourse on meadows, and
pure streams, and the country life. How
peaceful, men say, and blessed must
have been the life of this old man, how
lapped in content, and hedged about by
his own humility from the world ! They
forget, who speak thus, that thy years,
which were many, were also evil, or
would have seemed evil to divers that
had tasted of thy fortunes. Thou wert
poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow,
for greed of money was thy detestation.
Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age
when gentle blood was alone held in
regard ; yet thy virtues made thee hosts
of friends, and chiefly among religious
men, bishops, and doctors of the Church.
Thy private life was not unacquainted
with sorrow ; thy first wife and all her
fair children were taken from thee like

ISAAK WALTON 93

flowers in spring, though, in thine age,
new love and new offspring comforted
thee like 'the primrose of the later
year.' Thy private griefs might have
made thee bitter, or melancholy, so
might the sorrows of the State and of
the Church, which were deprived of their
heads by cruel men, despoiled of their
wealth, the pious driven, like thee, from
their homes ; fear everywhere, every-
where robbery and confusion : all this
ruin might have angered another temper.
But thou. Father, didst bear all with
so much sweetness as perhaps neither
natural temperament, nor a firm faith,
nor the love of angling could alone have
displayed. For we see many anglers (as
witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who
are angry men, and myself, when I get
my hooks entangled at every cast in a
tree, have come nigh to swear prophane.
Also we see religious men that are
sour and fanatical, no rare thing in
the party that professes godliness. But
neither private sorrow nor public grief

94 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

could abate thy natural kindliness, nor

shake a religion which was not untried,

but had, indeed, passed through the

furnace like fine gold. For if we find

not Faith at all times easy, because of

the oppositions of Science, and the

searching curiosity of men's minds,

neither was Faith a matter of course

in thy day. For the learned and pious

were greatly tossed about, like worthy

Mr. Chillingworth, by doubts wavering

between the Church of Rome and the

Reformed Church of England. The

humbler folk, also, were invited, now

here, now there, by the clamours of

fanatical Nonconformists, who gave

themselves out to be somebody, while

Atheism itself was not without many

to witness to it. Therefore, such a

religion as thine was not, so to say, a

mere innocence of evil in the things of

our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded

faith, strong in despite of oppositions.

Happy was the man in whom temper,

and religion, and the love of the sweet

ISAAC WALTON 95

country and an angler's pastime so con-
veniently combined ; happy the long life
which held in its hand that threefold
clue through the labyrinth of human
fortunes ! Around thee Church and
State might fall in ruins, and might be
rebuilded, and thy tears would not be
bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.

Thus, by God's blessing, it befell
thee

Nee turpem senectam
Degere, nee eithara earentetn.

I would. Father, that I could get at
the verity about thy poems. Those recom-
mendatory verses with which thou didst
grace the Lives of Dr. Donne and others
of thy friends, redound more to the praise
of thy kind heart than thy fancy. But
what or whose was the pastoral poem
of ' Thealma and Clearchus,' which thou
didst set about printing in 1678, and
gavest to the world in 1683 } Thou
gavest John Chalkhill for the author's
name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kin-
dred died at Winchester, being eighty

96 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

years of his age, in 1679. Now thou
speakest of John Chalkhill as ' a friend
of Edmund Spenser's,' and how could
this be ?

Are they right who hold that John
Chalkhill was but a name of a friend,
borrowed by thee out of modesty, and
used as a cloak to cover poetry of thine
own inditing ? When Mr. Flatman
writes of Chalkhill, 'tis in words well
fitted to thine own merit :

Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows
Except himself, who charitably shows
The ready road to virtue and to praise,
The road to many long and happy days.

However it be, in that road, by quiet
streams and through green pastures,
thou didst walk all thine almost century
of years, and we, who stray into thy
path out of the highway of life, we
seem to hold thy hand, and listen to
thy cheerful voice. If our sport be
worse, may our content be equal, and
our praise, therefore, none the less.
Father, if Master Stoddard, the great

ISAAC WALTON 97

fisher of Tweedside, be with thee, greet
him for me, and thank him for those
songs of his, and perchance he will troll
thee a catch of our dear River.

Tweed ! winding and wild ! where the heart is

unbound,
They know not, they dream not, who linger

around,
How the saddened will smile, and the wasted

rewin
From thee -the bliss withered within.

Or perhaps thou wilt better love,

The lanesome Tala and the Lyne,

And Manor wi' its mountain rills,
An' Etterick, whose waters twine

Wi' Yarrow frae the forest hills ;
An' Gala, too, and Teviot bright,

An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed,
Their kindred valleys a' unite

Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed !

So, Master, may you sing against each
other, you two good old anglers, like
Peter and Corydon, that sang in your
golden age.

H

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

To M. Chapelain.

Monsieur, — You were a popular
poet, and an honourable, over-educated,
upright gentleman. Of the latter cha-
racter you can never be deprived, and
I doubt not it stands you in better
stead where you are, than the laurels
which flourished so gaily, and faded so
soon.

Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for
a day,

But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel out-
lives not May.

I know not if Mr. Swinburne is cor-
rect in his botany, but your laurel cer-
tainly outlived not May, nor can we
hope that you dwell where Orpheus and
where Homer are. Some other crown,
some other Paradise, we cannot doubt

CHAPELAIN 99

it, awaited un si bon hoinnie. But the
moral excellence that even Boileau ad-
mitted, la foi, rhonneur, la probite, do
not in Parnassus avail the popular poet,
and some luckless Glatigny or Theophile,
Regnier or Gilbert, attains a kind of
immortality denied to the man of many
contemporary editions, and of a great
commercial success.

If ever, for the confusion of Horace,
any Poet was Made, you. Sir, should
have been that fortunately manufac-
tured article. You were, in matters of
the Muses, the child of many prayers.
Never, since Adam's day, have any
parents but yours prayed for a poet-
child. Then Dertiny, that mocks the
desires of men in general, and fathers in
particular, heard the appeal, and pre-
sented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Cor-
biere his wife with the future author of
* La Pucelle.' Oh futile hopes of men,
O pectora cceca ! All was done that
education could do for a genius which,
among other qualities, ' especially lacked

H 2

lOO LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

fire and imagination,' and an ear for
verse — sad defects these in a child of
the Muses. Your training in all the
mechanics and metaphysics of criticism
might have made you exclaim, like
Rasselas, ' Enough ! Thou hast con-
vinced me that no human being can
ever be a Poet.' Unhappily, you suc-
ceeded in convincing Cardinal Richelieu
that to be a Poet was well within your
powers, you received a pension of one
thousand crowns, and were made Cap-
tain of the Cardinal's Minstrels, as M.
de Trdville was Captain of the King's
Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when
good intentions in poetry were more
richly endowed than ever is Research
even Research in Prehistoric English,
among us niggard moderns ! How I
wish I knew a Cardinal, or even, as you
did, a Prime Minister, who would praise
and pension me ; but Envy be still ! Your
existence was made happy indeed ; you
constructed odes, corrected sonnets, pre-

CHAPELAIN loi

sided at the Hotel Rambouillet, while the
learned ladies were still young and fair,
and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity
on the score of your yet unpublished
Epic. ' Who, indeed,' says a sympathe-
tic author, M. Theophile Gautier, ' who
could expect less than a miracle from a
man so deeply learned in the laws of art
— a perfect Turk in the science of poetry,
a person so well pensioned, and so
favoured by the great ? ' Bishops and
politicians combined in perfect good faith
to advertise your merits. Hard must
have been the heart that could resist
the testimonials of your skill as a poet
offered by the Due de Montausier, and
the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches,
and Monseigneur Godeau, Bishop of
Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a
genius for finance.

If bishops and politicians and Prime
Ministers skilled in finance, and some
critics (Menage and Sarrazin and Vau-
gelas), if ladies of birth and taste, if all
the world in fact, combined to tell you

102 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

that you were a great poet, how can we
blame you for taking yourself seriously,
and appraising yourself at the public
estimate?

It was not in human nature to resist
the evidence of the bishops especially,
and when every minor poet believes in
himself on the testimony of his own con-
ceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if
you listened to the plaudits of your
friends. Nay, you ventured to pronounce
judgment on contemporaries whom Pos-
terity has preferred to your perfections.
'Moliere,' said you, * understands the
genius of comedy, and presents it in a
natural style. The plot of his best pieces
is borrowed, but not without judgment ;
his morale is fair, and he has only to
avoid scurrility.'

Excellent, unconscious, popular Cha-
pelain !

Of yourself you observed, in a Re-
port on contemporary literature, that
your * courage and sincerity never al-
lowed you to tolerate work not ab-

CHAPELAIN 103

solutely good.' And yet you regarded
'■ La Pucelle ' with some complacency.

On the * Pucelle ' you were occupied
during a generation of mortal men. I
marvel not at the length of your labours,
as you received a yearly pension till the
Epic was finished, but your Muse was no
Alcmena, and no Hercules was the re-
sult of that prolonged night of creation.
First you gravely wrote out all the com-
position in prose : the task occupied you
for five whole years. Ah, why did you
not leave it in that commonplace but
appropriate medium t What says the
Precieuse about you in Boileau's satire ?

In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,

She finds but one defect, he can't be read ;

Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden's woes.

If only he would turn his verse to prose !

The verse had been prose, and prose,
perhaps, it should have remained. Yet
for this precious ' Pucelle,' in the age
when * Paradise Lost ' was sold for five
pounds, you are believed to have received
about four thousand. Horace was wrong.

I04 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

mediocre poets may exist (now and then),
and he was a wise man who first spoke
of aiirea mediocritas. At length the
great work was achieved, a work thrice
blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden
to whom France owes all, and whom
you and Voltaire have recompensed so
strangely. In folio, in italics, with a
score of portraits and engravings, and
cuts de larnpe, the great work was given
to the world, and had a success. Six
editions in eighteen months are figures
which fill the poetic heart with envy and
admiration. And then, alas ! the bubble
burst. A great lady, Madame de Longue-
ville, hearing the ' Pucelle ' read aloud,
murmured that it was 'perfect indeed,
but perfectly wearisome.' Then the
satires began, and the satirists never
left you till your poetic reputation
was a rag, till the mildest Abbe at
Menage's had his cheap sneer for Cha-
pelain.

I make no doubt. Sir, that envy and
jealousy had much to do with the on-

CHAPELAIN 105

slaught on your ' Pucelle.' These quali-
ties, alas ! are not strange to literary
minds ; does not even Hesiod tell us
that ' potter hates potter, and poet hates
poet ' ? But contemporary spites do not
harm true genius. Who suffered more
than Moliere from cabals ? Yet neither
the court nor the town ever deserted
him, and he is still the joy of the world.
I admit that his adversaries were weaker
than yours. What were Boursault and
Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and
De Vis^, what were they all compared to
your enemy, Boileau ? Brossette tells a
story which really makes a man pity you.
You remember M. de Puimorin, who, to
be in the fashion, laughed at your once
popular Epic. ' It is all very well,' said
you, ' for a man to laugh who cannot even
read.' Whereon M. de Puimorin replied :
* Qu'il n'avoit que trop su lire, depuis
que Chapelain s'etoit avise de faire im-
primer.' A new horror had been added
to the accomplishment of reading since
Chapelain had published. This repartee

io6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried
to turn it into an epigram. He did com-
plete the last couplet,

Helas ! pour mes peches, je n'ai su que trop lire
Depuis que tu fais imprimer.

But by no labour would M. de Pui-
morin achieve the first two lines of his
epigram. Then you remember what
great allies came to his assistance. I
almost blush to think that M. Despreaux,
M. Racine, and M. de Moliere, the three
most renowned wits of the time, con-
spired to complete the poor jest, and
assail you. Well, bubble as your
poetry was, you may be proud that it
needed all these sharpest of pens to
prick the bubble. Other poets, as popu-
lar as you, have been annihilated by an
article. Macaulay put forth his hand,
and ' Satan Montgomery ' was no more.
It did not need a Macaulay, the laughter
of a mob of little critics was enough to
blow him into space ; but you probably
have met Montgomery, and of contempo-
rary failures or successes I do not speak.

CHAPELAIN 107

I wonder, sometimes, whether the con-
sensus of criticism ever made you doubt
for a moment whether, after all, you were
not a false child of Apollo? Was your
complacency tortured, as the compla-
cency of true poets has occasionally been,
by doubts ? Did you expect posterity
to reverse the verdict of the satirists,
and to do you justice ? You answered
your earliest assailant, Liniere, and, by
a few changes of words, turned his epi-
grams into flattery. But I fancy, on
the whole, you remained calm, unmoved,
wrapped up in admiration of yourself. Ac-
cording to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed,
as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty
dead, you * conceived, on the strength of
your reputation, a great and serious
veneration for yourself and your genius.*
Probably you were protected by the in-
vulnerable armour of an honest vanity,
probably you declared that mere jealousy
dictated the lines of Boileau, and that
Chapelain's real fault was his popularity,
and his pecuniary success,

Qu'il soit le mieux rente de tous les beaux-esprits.

io8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

This, you would avow, was your
offence, and perhaps you were not alto-
gether mistaken. Yet posterity declines
to read a line of yours, and, as we think
of you, we are again set face to face with
that eternal problem, how far is popu-
larity a test of poetry? Burns was a
poet : and popular. Byron was a popular
poet, and the world agrees in the verdict
of their own generations. But Mont-
gomery, though he sold so well, was no
poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse
made of the stuff of immortality. Cri-
ticism cannot hurt what is truly great ;
the Cardinal and the Academy left
Chimene as fair as ever, and as adorable.
It is only pinchbeck that perishes under
the acids of satire : gold defies them.
Yet I sometimes ask myself, does the
existence of popularity like yours justify
the malignity of satire, which blesses
neither him who gives, nor him who
takes ? Are poisoned arrows fair against
a bad poet? I doubt it, Sir, holding
that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble

CHAPEL A IN 109

must soon burst by its own nature. Yet
satire will assuredly be written so long
as bad poets are successful, and bad
poets will assuredly reflect that their
assailants are merely envious, and (while
their vogue lasts) that the purchasing
public is the only judge. After all, the
bad poet who is popular and ' sells ' is
not a whit worse than the bad poets who
are unpopular, and who deride his songs.
Monsieur,
Votre tres-humble serviteur, &c.

10 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XL

To Sir John Maundeville, Kt.

(OF THE WAYS INTO YNDE.)

Sir John,— Wit you well that men
holden you but light, and some clepen
you a Liar. And they say that you
never were born in Englond, in the town
of Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone
through manye diverse Londes. And
there goeth an old knight at arms, and
one that connes Latyn, and hath been
beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester
John's country. And he hath been in
an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and
there bin women bearded. Now men
call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he
hath writ of thee in his great booke, Sir
John, and he holds thee but lightly. For
he saith that ye did pill your tales out

5/A' JOHN MAUNDEVILLE iii

of Odoric his book, and that ye never
saw snails with shells as big as houses,
nor never met no Devyls, but part of
that ye say, ye took it out of William of
Boldensele his book, yet ye took not
his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own
foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir John, for
the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a
good fellow, and a merry ; so now, come,
let me tell you of the new ways into
Ynde.

In that Lond they have a Queen
that governeth all the Lond, and all
they ben obeyssant to her. And she is
the Queen of Englond ; for Englishmen
have taken all the Lond of Ynde. For
they were right good werryoures of old,
and wyse, noble, and worthy. But of
late hath risen a new sort of Englishman
very puny and fearful, and these men
clepen Radicals. And they go ever in
fear, and they scream on high for dread
in the streets and the houses, and they
fain would flee away from all that their
fathers gat them with the sword. And

112 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

this sort men call Scuttleres, but the
mean folk and certain of the baser sort
hear them gladly, and they say ever that
Englishmen should flee out of Ynde.

Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by
many dy verse Contreyes. For English-
men ben very stirring and nymble. For
they ben in the seventh climate, that is
of the Moon. And the Moon (ye have
said it yourself, Sir John, natheless, is it
true) is of lightly moving, for to go di-
verse ways, and see strange things, and
other diversities ofthe Worlde. Where-
fore Englishmen be lightly moving, and
far wandering. And they gon to Ynde
by the great Sea Ocean. First come
they to Gibraltar, that was the point of
Spain, and builded upon a rock ; and
there ben apes, and it is so strong that
no man may take it. Natheless did
Englishmen take it fro the Spanyard,
and all to hold the way to Ynde. For
ye may sail all about Africa, and past
the Cape men clepen of Good Hope,
but that way unto Ynde is long and the

SIR JOHN MA UNDE VILLE 1 1 3

sea is weary. Wherefore men rather go
by the Midland sea, and Englishmen
have taken many Yles in that sea.

For first they have taken an Yle that
is clept Malta ; and therein built they
great castles, to hold it against them of
Fraunce, and Italy, and of Spain. And
from this He of Malta Men gon to
Cipre. And Cipre is right a good Yle,
and a fair, and a great, and it hath 4
principal Cytees within him. And at
Famagost is one of the principal Havens
of the sea that is in the world, and
Englishmen have but a lytel while gone
won that Yle from the Sarazynes. Yet
say that sort of Englishmen where of I
told you, that is puny and sore adread,
that the Lond is poisonous and barren
and of no avail, for that Lond is much
more hotter than it is here. Yet the
Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell
there in tents, and the skill is that they
may ben the more fresh.

From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond
of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night

I

114 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

he that hath a good wind may come to
the Haven of Alessandrie. Now the
Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan,
yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond
of Egypt. And when I say this, I do
jape with words, and may hap ye under-
stond me not Now Englishmen went
in shippes to Alessandrie, and brent it,
and over ran the Lond, and their soud-
yours warred agen the Bedoynes, and
all to hold the way to Ynde. For it is
not long past since Frenchmen let dig
a dyke, through the narrow spit of lond,
from the Midland sea to the Red sea,
wherein was Pharaoh drowned. So this
is the shortest way to Ynde there may
be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon
by sea.

But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen
the Vale enchaunted ; for no man may
do his business well that goes thither,
but always fares he evil, and therefore
clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous,
and the sepulchre of reputations. And
men say there that is one of the entrees

S/Ji JOHN MA UNDE VILLE 1 1 5

of Helle. In that Vale is plentiful lack
of Gold and Silver, for many misbe-
lieving men, and many Christian men
also, have gone often time for to take
of the Thresoure that there was of old,
and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore
there is none left. And Englishmen
have let carry thither great store of our
Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling,
and whether they will see it agen I mis-
doubt me. For that Vale is alle fulle
of Develes and Fiendes that men clepen
Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde
is the Lond of Bondage. And whatso-
ever Thresoure cometh into the Lond,
these Devyls of Bondholders grabben
the same. Natheless by that Vale do
Englishmen go unto Ynde, and they
gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the
mouth of the Flood of Ynde. Thereby
they send their souldyours, when they
are adread of them of Muscovy.

For, look you, there is another way
into Ynde, and thereby the men of Mus-
covy are fain to come, if the Englishmen

I 2

ii6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

let them not. That way cometh by De-
sert and Wildernesse, from the sea that
is clept Caspian, even to Khiva, and so
to Merv ; and then come ye to Zulfikar
and Penjdeh, and anon to Herat, that is
called the Key of the Gates of Ynde.
Then ye win the lond of the Emir of
the Afghauns, a great prince and a rich,
and he hath in his Thresoure more
crosses, and stars, and coats that captains
wearen, than any other man on earth.

For all they of Muscovy, and all
Englishmen maken him gifts, and he
keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his
own counsel. For his lond lieth be
tween Ynde and the folk of Mus-
covy, wherefore both Englishmen and
men of Muscovy would fain have him
friendly, yea, and independent. Where-
fore they of both parties give him clocks,
and watches, and stars, and crosses, and
culverins, and now and again they let
cut the throats of his men some deal,
and pill his country. . Thereby they both
set up their rest that the Emir will be

SIR JOHN MA UNDE VJLLE 1 1 7

independent, yea, and friendly. But his
men love him not, neither love they
the English, nor the Muscovy folk, for
they are worshippers of Mahound, and
endure not Christian men. And they
love not them that cut their throats, and
burn their country.

Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls,
and they ben subtle for to make a thing
seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive
mankind. Wherefore Englishmen putten
no trust in them of Muscovy, save only
the Englishmen clept Radicals, for they
make as if they loved these Develes, out
of the fear and dread of war wherein
they go, and would be slaves sooner
than fight. But the folk of Ynde know
not what shall befall, nor whether they of
Muscovy will take the Lond, or English-
men shall keep it, so that their hearts
may not enduren for drede. And me-
thinks that soon shall Englishmen and
Muscovy folk put their bodies in adven-
ture, and war one with another, and all
for the way to Ynde.

ii8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

But St. George for Englond, I say,
and so enough ; and may the Seyntes
hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Arte-
tykes, that thee tormenten. But to thy
Boke i list not to give no credence.

119

XII.

To Alexandre Dumas.

Sir, — There are moments when the
wheels of Hfe, even of such a life as
yours, run slow, and when mistrust and
doubt overshadow even the most intrepid
disposition. In such a moment, towards
the ending of your days, you said to
your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, ' I seem
to see myself set on a pedestal which
trembles as if it were founded on the
sands.' These sands, your uncounted
volumes, are all of gold, and make a
foundation more solid than the rock.
As well might the singer of Odysseus,
or the authors of the ' Arabian Nights,'
or the first inventors of the stories of
Boccaccio, believe that their works were
perishable (their names, indeed, have
perished), as the creator of ' Les Trois

120 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Mousquetaires'^ alarm himself with the
thought that the^ world could ever forget
Alexandre Dumas.

Than yours there has been no greater
nor more kindly and beneficent force in
modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you
owed the first impulse of your genius ;
but, once set in motion, what miracles
could it not accomplish? Our dear
Porthos was overcome, at last, by a super-
human burden ; but your imaginative
strength never found a task too great for
it. What an extraordinary vigour, what
health, what an overflow of force was
yours ! It is good, in a day of small
and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the
free air of your books, and dwell in the
company of Dumas's men — so gallant,
so frank, so indomitable, such swords-
men, and such trenchermen. Like M.
de Rochefort in ' Vingt Ans Apres,' like
that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius
* n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du
grand air.'

There seems to radiate from you a

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 121

still persistent energy and enjoyment ;
in that current of strength not only your
characters live, frolic, kindly, and sane,
but even your very collaborators were
animated by the virtue which went out
of you. How else can we explain it,
the dreary charge which feeble and en-
vious tongues have brought against you,
in England and at home? They say
you employed in your novels and dramas
that vicarious aid which, in the slang of
the studio, the * sculptor's ghost ' is fabled
to afford.

Well, let it be so ; these ghosts, when
uninspired by you, were faint and im-
potent as ' the strengthless tribes of the
dead ' in Homer's Hades, before Odys-
seus had poured forth the blood that
gave them a momentary valour. It was
from you and your inexhaustible vitality
that these collaborating spectres drew
what life they possessed ; and when
they parted from you they shuddered
back into their nothingness. Where are
the plays, where the romances which

122 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Maquet and the rest wrote in their own
strength ? They are forgotten with last
year's snows ; they have passed into the
wide waste-paper basket of the world.
You say of D'Artagnan, when severed
from his three friends — from Porthos,
Athos, and Aramis— *he felt that he
could do nothing, save on the condition
that each of these companions yielded
to him, if one may so speak, a share of
that electric fluid which was his gift from
heaven.'

No man of letters ever had so great
a measure of that gift as you ; none
gave of it more freely to all who came
— to the chance associate of the hour,
as to the characters, all so burly and full-
blooded, who flocked from your brain.
Thus it was that you failed when you
approached the supernatural. Your
ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more
than the living persons of feebler fancies.
A writer so fertile, so rapid, so masterly
in the ease with which he worked, could
not escape the reproaches of barren envy.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 123

Because you overflowed with wit, you
could not be * serious ; ' because you
created with a word, you were said to
scamp your work ; because you were
never dull, never pedantic, incapable
of greed, you were to be censured as
desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental
and physical anaemia — a generation de-
voted to the 'chiselled phrase,' to ac-
cumulated * documents,' to microscopic
porings over human baseness, to minute
and disgustful records of what in hu-
manity is least human — may readily
bring these unregarded and railing ac-
cusations. Like one of the great and
good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you
may hear the murmurs from afar, and
smile with disdain. To you, who can
amuse the world — to you who offer it
the fresh air of the highway, the battle-
field, and the sea — the world must always
return : escaping gladly from the bou-
doirs and the bouges, from the surge-
ries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of

124 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the weari-
some De Goncourt.

With all your frankness, and with
that queer morality of the Camp which,
if it swallows a camel now and again,
never strains at a gnat, how healthy and
wholesome, and even pure, are your ro-
mances ! You never gloat over sin, nor
dabble with an ugly curiosity in the
corruptions of sense. The passions in
your tales are honourable and brave, the
motives are clearly human. Honour,
Love, Friendship make the threefold
cord, the clue your knights and dames
follow through how delightful a la-
byrinth of adventures ! Your greatest
books, I take the liberty to maintain, are
the Cycle of the Valois (* La Reine Mar-
got,' * La Dame de Montsoreau,' ' Les
Quarante-cinq '), and the Cycle of Louis
Treize and Louis Quatorze (' Les Trois
Mousquetaires,' * Vingt Ans Apres,' ' Le
Vicomte de Bragelonne ') ; and, beside
these two trilogies — a lonely monument,
like the sphinx hard by the three pyra-
mids— ' Monte Cristo.'

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 125

In these romances how easy it would
have been for you to burn incense to
that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our
critic says your people worship. You
had Brantome, you had Tallemant, you
had Retif, and a dozen others, to furnish
materials for scenes of voluptuousness
and of blood that would have outdone
even the present naturalistes. From
these alcoves of * Les Dames Galantes,'
and from the torture chambers (M. Zola
would not have spared us one starting
sinew of brave La Mole on the rack)
you turned, as Scott would have turned,
without a thought of their profitable
literary uses. You had other metal to
work on : you gave us that superstitious
and tragical true love of La Mole's, that
devotion — how tender and how pure ! —
of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau.
You gave us the valour of D'Artagnan,
the strength of Porthos, the melancholy
nobility of Athos : Honour, Chivalry, and
Friendship. I declare your characters
are real people to me and old friends. I

126 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

cannot bear to read the end of ' Brage-
lonne,' and to part with them for ever.
* Suppose Porthos, Athos, and Aramis
should enter with a noiseless swagger,
curling their moustaches.' How we would
welcome them, forgiving D'Artagnan even
hish3itefu\ /oil rderie in the case of Milady.
The brilliance of your dialogue has never
been approached : there is wit every-
where ; repartees glitter and ring like
the flash and clink of small-swords.
Then what duels are yours ! and what
inimitable battle-pieces ! I know four
good fights of one against a multitude,
in literature. These are the Death of
Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar
of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the
Wake, the Death of Bussy d'Amboise.
We can compare the strokes of the
heroic fighting-times with those de-
scribed in later days ; and, upon my
word, I do not know that the short sword
of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin, or
the bow of Gunnar was better wielded
than the rapier of your Bussy or the

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 127

sword and shield of Kingsley's Here-
ward.

They say your fencing is unhistorical ;
no doubt it is so, and you knew it. La
Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas
' after deceiving circle ; ' for the parry
was not invented except by your im-
mortal Chicot, a genius in advance of
his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes
would have fought with shields and axes,
not with small swords. But what mat-
ters this pedantry } In your works we
hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing
in the clash of steel ; and even, at times,
your very phrases are unconsciously
Homeric.

Look at these men of murder, on the
Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in ter-
ror from the Queen's chamber, and ' find
the door too narrow for their flight : ' the
very words were anticipated in a line of
the * Odyssey ' concerning the massacre
of the Wooers. And the picture of Cathe-
rine de Medicis, prowling * like a wolf
among the bodies and the blood,' in a

128 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

passage of the Louvre — the picture is
taken unwittingly from the ' Iliad.'
There was in you that reserve of pri-
mitive force, that epic grandeur and
simplicity of diction. Tliis is the force
that animates ' Monte Cristo/ the earlier
chapters, the prison, and the escape. In
later volumes of that romance, methinks,
you stoop your wing. Of your dramas
I have little room, and less skill, to
speak. ' Antony,' they tell me, was * the
greatest literary event of its time,' was a
restoration of the stage. ' While Victor
Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of his-
tory, the wardrobe and costume, the
sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost
of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia
Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no
more than a room in an inn, where
people meet in riding cloaks, to move
the soul with the last degree of terror
and of pity.'

The reproach of being amusing has
somewhat dimmed your fame — for a
moment. The shadow of this tyranny

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 129

will soon be overpast ; and when ^ La
Curee' and ' Pot-Bouille ' are more for-
gotten than * Le Grand Cyrus,' men and
women— and, above all, boys — will laugh
and weep over the page of Alexandre
Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take
us captive in our childhood. I remem-
ber a very idle little boy who was busy
with the * Three Musketeers ' when he
should have been occupied with ' Wil-
kins's Latin Prose.' * Twenty years
after' (alas! and more) he is still con-
stant to that gallant company ; and, at
this very moment, is breathlessly won-
dering whether Grimaud will steal M. de
Beaufort out of the Cardinal's prison.

K

I30 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XIII.
To Theocritus.

* Sweet, methinks, is the whispering
sound of yonder pine-tree,' so, Theo-
critus, with that sweet word ahv, didst
thou begin and strike the keynote of thy
songs. ' Sweet,' and didst thou find
aught of sweet, when thou, Hke thy
Daphnis, didst ' go down the stream,
when the whirHng wave closed over the
man the Muses loved, the man not
hated of the Nymphs ' ? Perchance
below those waters of death thou didst
find, like thine own Hylas, the lovely
Nereids waiting thee, Elinice, and Malis,
and Nycheia with her April eyes. In
the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth
there dwell aught that is fair, and can
the low light on the fields of asphodel
make thee forget thy Sicily? Nay,

THEOCRITUS 131

methinks thou hast not forgotten, and
perchance for poets dead there is pre-
pared a place more beautiful than their
dreams. It was well for the later min-
strels of another day, it was well for
Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim
Elysium of their own, where the sun-
light comes faintly through the shadow
of the earth, where the poplars are
duskier, and the waters more pale than
in the meadows of Anjou.

There, in that restful twilight, far re-
mote from war and plot, from sword and
fire, and from religions that sharpened
the steel and lit the torch, there these
learned singers would fain have wandered
with their learned ladies, satiated with
life and in love with an unearthly quiet.
But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of
the Hollow Land was dear, but the high
suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of
the country maidens were happiness
enough. For thee, therefore, methinks,
surely is reserved an Elysium beneath
the summer of a far-off system, with

K 2

132 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

stars not ours and alien seasons. There,
as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice
desirable, be with thee the whole year
through, where there is neither frost,
nor is the heat so heavy on men, but all
is fruitful, and all sweet things blossom,
and evenly meted are darkness and
dawn. Space is wide, and there be
many worlds, and suns enow, and the
Sun-god surely has had a care of his
own. Little didst thou need, in thy
native land, the isle of the three capes,
little didst thou need but sunlight on
land and sea. Death can have shown
thee naught dearer than the fragrant
shadow of the pines, where the dry
needles of the fir are strewn, or glades
where feathered ferns make ' a couch
more soft than Sleep.' The short grass
of the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where
thou wouldst lie, and watch, with the
tunny watcher till the deep blue sea
was broken by the burnished sides of
the tunny shoal, and afoam with their
gambols in the brine. There the Mu^es

THEOCRITUS 133

met thee, and the Nymphs, and there
Apollo, remembering his old thraldom
with Admetus, would lead once more
a mortal's flocks, and listen and learn,
Theocritus, while thou, like thine own
Comatas, * didst sweetly sing.'

There, methinks, I see thee as in thy
happy days, ' reclined on deep beds of
fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and re-
joicing in new stript leaves of the vine,
while far above thy head waved many a
poplar, many an elm-tree, and close at
hand the sacred waters sang from the
mouth of the cavern of the nymphs.'
And when night came, methinks thou
wouldst flee from the merry company
and the dancing girls, from the fading
crowns of roses or white violets, from
the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and
the Bibline wine, from these thou
wouldst slip away into the summer
night. Then the beauty of life and of
the summer would keep thee from thy
couch, and wandering away from Syra-
cuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou

134 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

wouldst watch the low cabin, roofed
with grass, where the fishing-rods ot
reed were leaning against the door,
while the Mediterranean floated up her
waves, and filled the waste with sound.
There didst thou see thine ancient fisher-
men rising ere the dawn from their
bed of dry seaweed, and heardst them
stirring, drowsy, among their fishing
gear, and heardst them tell their dreams.
Or again thou wouldst wander with
dusty feet through the ways that the
dust makes silent, while the breath of
the kine, as they were driven forth with
the morning, came fresh to thee, and the
trailing dewy branch of honeysuckle
struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou
wouldst see the Dawn awake in rose
and saffron across the waters, and Etna,
grey and pale against the sky, and the
setting crescent would dip strangely in
the glow, on her way to the sea. Then,
methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like
thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch,
' Farewell, Selene, bright and fair ; fare-

THEOCRITUS 135

well, ye other stars, that follow the
wheels of the quiet Night' Nay, surely
it was in such an hour that thou didst
behold the girl as she burned the laurel
leaves and the barley grain, and melted
the waxen image, and called on Selene
to bring her lover home. Even so, even
now, in the islands of Greece, the set-
ting Moon may listen to the prayers of
maidens. ' Bright golden Moon, that
now art near the waters, go thou and
salute my lover, he that stole my love,
and that kissed me, saying "Never will I
leave thee." And lo, he hath left me as
men leave a field reaped and gleaned,
like a church where none cometh to
pray, like a city desolate.'

So the girls still sing in Greece, for
though the Temples have fallen, and the
wandering shepherds sleep beneath the
broken columns of the god's house in
Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still
to the old divinities in the shrines of the
hearths of the peasants. It is none of
the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of

136 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

the Sicilian shepherds of our time, ' Ah,
light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send
thee, what offering to the other world ?
The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth,
and one by one they perish, the petals
of the rose. I will send thee my tears
shed on a napkin, and what though it
burneth in the flame, if my tears reach
thee at the last.'

Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on
these shores beneath the sun, where thou
didst wear a tawny skin stripped from
the roughest of he-goats, and about thy
breast an old cloak buckled with a
plaited belt. Thou wert happier there,
in Sicily, methinks, and among vines
and shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in
the dust, and heat, and noise of Alex-
andria. What love of fame, what lust
of gold tempted thee away from the red
cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black
water wreathed with maidenhair ?

The music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy country tone ;
Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note

THEOCRITUS 137

Of men contention tost, of men who groan,

Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat —
It failed, and thou wast mute !

What hadst thoii to make in cities,
and what could Ptolemies and Princes
give thee better than the goat-milk
cheese and the Ptelean wine? Thy
Muses were meant to be the delight
of peaceful men, not of tyrants and
wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly
went on a begging errand. 'Who will
open his door and gladly receive our
Muses within his house, who is there
that will not send them back again
without a gift ? And they with naked
feet and looks askance come home-
wards, and sorely they upbraid me when
they have gone on a vain journey, and
listless again in the bottom of their
empty coffer they dwell with heads
bowed over their chilly knees, where
is their drear abode, when portionless
they return.' How far happier was
the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the
fragrant cedar chest where the blunt-

138 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

faced bees from the meadow fed him
with food of tender flowers, because
still the Muse dropped sweet nectar
on his lips !

Thou didst leave the neat-herds and
the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the
galingale hummed over by the bees, and
the pine that dropped her cones, and
Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca
with her feet of carven ivory. Thou
soughtest the City, and strife with other
singers, and the learned write still on
thy quarrels with ApoUonius and Calli-
machus, and Antagoras of Rhodes. So
ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy,
jealousy, and all unkindness.

Not to the wits of Courts couldst
thou teach thy rural song, though all
these centuries, more than two thousand
years, they have laboured to vie with
thee. There has come no new pastoral
poet, though Virgil copied thee, and Pope,
and Phillips, and all the buckram band
of the teacup time; and all the modish
swains of France have sung against thee,

THEOCRITUS 139

as the sow challenged Athene. They
never knew the shepherd's life, the long
winter nights on dried heather by the
fire, the long summer days, when over
the parched grass all is quiet, and only
the insects hum, and the shrunken burn
whispers a silver tune. Swains in high-
heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in
rouge and diamonds, the world is weary
of all concerning them, save their images
in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy
golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite,
of Bombyca and Battus ! Somewhat,
Theocritus, thou hast to answer for,
thou that first of men brought the
shepherd to Court, and made courtiers
wild to go a Maying with the shepherds.

140 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XIV.

To Edgar Allan Poe.

Sir, — Your English readers, better
acquainted with your poems and ro-
mances than with your criticisms, have
long wondered at the indefatigable hatred
which pursues your memory. You, who
knew the men, will not marvel that cer-
tain microbes of letters, the survivors of
your own generation, still harass your
name with their malevolence, while old
women twitter out their incredible and
unheeded slanders in the literary papers
of New York. But their persistent
animosity does not quite suffice to
explain the dislike with which many
American critics regard the greatest poet,
perhaps the greatest literary genius, of
their country. With a commendable
patriotism, they are not apt to rate native

EDGAR ALLAN FOE 141

merit too low ; and you, I think, are
the only example of an American pro-
phet almost without honour in his own
country.

The recent publication of a cold,
careful, and in many respects admirable
study of your career (' Edgar Allan
Poe,' by George Woodberry : Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds Eng-
lish readers who have forgotten it, and
teaches those who never knew it, that
you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer.
How unhappy were the necessities, how
deplorable the vein, that compelled or
seduced a man of your eminence into
the dusty and stony ways of contempo-
rary criticism ! About the writers of his
own generation a leader of that gene-
ration should hold his peace. He should
neither praise nor blame nor defend his
equals ; he should not strike one blow at
the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The
breath of their life is in the columns ot
* Literary Gossip ; ' and they should be
allowed to perish with the weekly adver-

142 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

tisements on which they pasture. Re-
viewing, of course, there must needs
be ; but great minds should only criticise
the great who have passed beyond the
reach of eulogy or fault-finding.

Unhappily, taste and circumstances
combined to make you a censor ; you
vexed a continent, and you are still
unforgiven. What ' irritation of a sensi-
tive nature, chafed by some indefinite
sense of wrong,' drove you (in Mr. Long-
fellow's own words) to attack his pure
and beneficent Muse we may never
ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave
you easily ; for pardon comes easily to
the great. It was the smaller men, the
Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that
knew not how to forget. ' The New
Yorkers never forgave him,' says your
latest biographer ; and one scarcely mar-
vels at the inveteracy of their malice.
It was not individual vanity alone, but
the whole literary class that you assailed.
*As a literary people,' you wrote, 'we
are one vast perambulating humbug.'

EDGAR ALLAN FOE 143

After that declaration of war you died,
and left your reputation to the vanities
yet writhing beneath your scorn. They
are writhing and writing still. He who
knows them need not linger over the
attacks and defences of your personal
character ; he will not waste time on
calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters,
and all the noisome dust which takes so
long in settling above your tomb.

For us it is enough to know that
you were compelled to live by your pen,
and that in an age when the author of
' To Helen ' and ' The Cask of Amontil-
lado ' was paid at the rate of a dollar a
column. When such poverty was the
mate of such pride as yours, a misery more
deep than that of Burns, an agony longer
than Chatterton's, were inevitable and
assured. No man was less fortunate
than you in the moment of his birth —
infelix opportunitaie vitce. Had you lived
a generation later, honour, wealth, ap-
plause, success in Europe and at home,
would all have been yours. Within

144 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

thirty years so great a change has passed
over the profession of letters in Ame-
rica ; and it is impossible to estimate
the rewards which would have fallen to
Edgar Poe, had chance made him the
contemporary of Mark Twain and of
' Called Back' It may be that your
criticisms helped to bring in the new
era, and to lift letters out of the reach
of quite unlettered scribblers. Though
not a scholar, at least you had a respect
for scholarship. You might still marvel
over such words as ' objectional ' in the
new biography of yourself, and might
ask what is meant by such a sentence
as ' his connection with it had inured to
his own benefit by the frequent puffs of
himself,' and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a
critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to
discuss your few and elaborate poems
is a waste of time, so completely does
your own brief definition of poetry, * the
rhythmic creation of the beautiful,' ex-

EDGAR ALLAN FOE 145

haust your theory, and so perfectly is
the theory illustrated by the poems.
Natural bent, and reaction against the
example of Mr. Longfellow, combined
to make you too intolerant of what
you call the ' didactic ' element in verse.
Even if morality be not seven-eighths
of our life (the exact proportion as at
present estimated), there was a place
even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature
of the case must always be the largest
public.

' Music is the perfection of the soul
or the idea of poetry,' so you wrote ;
' the vagueness of exaltation aroused by
a sweet air (which should be indefinite
and never too strongly suggestive) is
precisely what we should aim at in
poetry.' You aimed at that mark, and
struck it again and again, notably in
* Helen, thy beauty is to me,' in ' The
Haunted Palace,' ' The Valley of Unrest,'
and ' The City in the Sea.' But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have

I.

146 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

been foreseen, you are, to the world, the
poet of one poem — ' The Raven : ' a
piece in which the music is highly arti-
ficial, and the ' exaltation ' (what there
is of it) by no means particularly 'vague.'
So a portion of the public know little of
Shelley but the ' Skylark,' and those two
incongruous birds, the lark and the raven,
bear each of them a poet's name, vivu'
per ora virum. Your theory of poetry,
if accepted, would make you (after the
author of ' Kubla Khan ') the foremost
of the poets of the world ; at no long
distance would come Mr. William Morris
as he was when he wrote * Golden Wings,'
' The Blue Closet,' and ' The Sailing of
the Sword ; ' and, close up, Mr. Lear, the
author of 'The Yongi Bongi Bo,' and
the lay of the ' Jumblies.'

On the other hand Homer would
sink into the limbo to which you con-
signed Moliere. If we may judge a
theory by its results, when compared
with the deliberate verdict of the world,
your aesthetic does not seem to hold

EDGAR ALLAN FOE 147

water. The 'Odyssey' is not really
inferior to ' Ulalume/ as it ought to be
if your doctrine of poetry were correct,
nor ' Le Festin de Pierre ' to * Undine.'
Yet you deserve the praise of having
been constant, in your poetic practice,
to your poetic principles — principles
commonly deserted by poets who, like
Wordsworth, have published their aesthe-
tic system. Your pieces are few ; and
Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, ' a barren rascal.' But how
can a writer's verses be numerous if
with him, as with you, ' poetry is not a
pursuit but a passion . . . which can-
not at will be excited with an eye to the
paltry compensations or the more paltry
commendations of mankind ! ' Of you
it may be said, more truly than Shelley
said it of himself, that ' to ask you for
anything human, is like asking at a gin-
shop for a leg of mutton.'

Humanity must always be, to the
majority of men, the true stuff of poetry ;
and only a minority will thank you for

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148 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

that rare music which (like the strains
of the fiddler in the story) is touched on
a single string, and on an instrument
fashioned from the spoils of the grave.
You chose, or you were destined

To vary from the kindly race of men ;

and the consequences, which wasted your
life, pursue your reputation.

For your stories has been reserved
a boundless popularity, and that highest
success— the success of a perfectly sym-
pathetic translation. By this time, of
course, you have made the acquaintance
of your translator, M. Charles Baudelaire,
who so strenuously shared your views
about Mr. Emerson and the Transcen-
dentalists, and who so energetically
resisted all those ideas of ' progress '
which ' came from Hell or Boston.' On
this point, however, the world continues
to differ from you and M. Baudelaire,
and perhaps there is only the choice
between our optimism and universal
suicide or universal opium-eating. But

EDGAR ALLAN FOE 149

to discuss your ultimate ideas is perhaps
a profitless digression from the topic of
your prose romances.

An English critic (probably a North-
erner at heart) has described them as
' Hawthorne and delirium tremens.' I
am not aware that extreme orderliness,
masterly elaboration, and unchecked
progress towards a predetermined ef-
fect are characteristics of the visions of
delirium. If they be, then there is a
deal of truth in the criticism, and a good
deal of delirium tremens in your style.
But your ingenuity, your completeness,
your occasional luxuriance of fancy and
wealth of jewel- like words, are not, per-
haps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at
his command. He was a great writer —
the greatest writer in prose fiction whom
America has produced. But you and
he have not much in common, except a
certain mortuary turn of mind and a
taste for gloomy allegories about the
workings of conscience.

I forbear to anticipate your verdict

ISO LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in
the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one
single effect. Probably you would not
be very tolerant (tolerance was not
your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now
your countrymen's favourite novelist.
He is long, he is didactic, he is emi-
nently uninspired. In the works of one
who is, what you were called yourself, a
Bostonian, you would admire, at least,
the acute observation, the subtlety, and
the unfailing distinction. But, destitute
of humour as you unhappily but unde-
niably were, you would miss, I fear, the
charm of * Daisy Miller.' You would
admit the unity of effect secured in
' Washington Square,' though that effect
is as remote as possible from the terror
of ' The House of Usher ' or the vindic-
tive triumph of ' The Cask of Amontil-
lado.'

Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and
solitary spirit : a genius tethered to the

EDGAR ALLAN POE 151

hack-work of the press, a gentleman
among canaille^ a poet among poetasters,
dowered with a scholar's taste without
a scholar's training, embittered by his
sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by
his consolations.

152 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XV.

To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.

Rodono, St. Mary's Loch :
Sept. 8, 1885.

Sir, — In your biography it is recorded
that you not only won the favour of all
men and women ; but that a domestic
fowl conceived an affection for you, and
that a pig, by his will, had never been
severed from your company. If some
Circe had repeated in my case her fa-
vourite miracle of turning mortals into
swine, and had given me a choice, into
that fortunate pig, blessed among his
race, would I have been converted ! You,
almost alone among men of letters, still,
like a living friend, win and charm us
out of the past ; and if one might call
up a poet, as the scholiast tried to call
Homer, from the shades, who would not,

SIR WALTER SCOTT 153

out of all the rest, demand some hours
of your society ? Who that ever med-
dled with letters, what child of the irrit-
able race, possessed even a tithe of your
simple manliness, of the heart that never
knew a touch of jealousy, that envied
no man his laurels, that took honour
and wealth as they came, but never
would have deplored them had you
missed both and remained but the Bor-
der sportsman and the Border antiquary ?
Were the word ' genial ' not so much
profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and
sensual indolence, that worn old term
might be applied, above all men, to * the
Shirra.' But perhaps we scarcely need
a word (it would be seldom in use) for a
character so rare, or rather so lonely, in
its nobility and charm as that of Walter
Scott. Here, in the heart of your own
country, among your own grey round-
shouldered hills (each so like the other
that the shadow of one falling on its
neighbour exactly outlines that neigh-

154 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

hour's shape), it is of you and of your
works that a native of the Forest is
most frequently brought in mind. All
the spirits of the river and the hill, all
the dying refrains of ballad and the
fading echoes of story, ,all the memory
of the wild past, each legend of burn
and loch, seem to have cqrnbined to in-
form your spirit, and to secure themselves
an immortal life in your song. It is
through you that we remember them ;
and in recalling them; as in treading
each hillside in this land, we again re-
member you and bless you.

It is not * Sixty Years Since ' the
echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell
for the last time on your ear ; not sixty
years since, and how much is altered !
But two generations have passed ; the
lad who used to ride from Edinburgh to
Abbotsford, carrying new books for you,
and old, is still vending, in George Street,
old books and new. Of politics I have
not the heart to speak. Little joy would
you have had in most that has befallen

SJJ^ WALTER SCOTT 155

since the Reform Bill was passed, to the
chivalrous cry of 'burke Sir Walter.'
We are still very Radical in the Forest,
and you were taken away from many
evils to come. How would the cheek of
Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed
at the names of Majuba, The Soudan,
Maiwand, and many others that recall
political cowardice or military incapacity !
On the other hand, who but you could
have sung the dirge of Gordon, or
wedded with immortal verse the names
of Hamilton (who fell with Cavagnari),
of the two Stewarts, of many another
clansman, brave among the bravest !
Only he who told how

The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood

could have fitly rhymed a score of feats
of arms in which, as at M'Neill's Zareba
and at Abu Klea,

Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well.

Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may
wax faint, and the voting classes may

I $6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

forget that they are Britons ; but when
it comes to blows our fighting men
might cry, with Leyden,

My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi' me !

Much is changed, in the country-side as
well as in the country; but much re-
mains. The little towns of your time
are populous and excessively black with
the smoke of factories — not, I fear, at
present very flourishing. In Galashiels
you still see the little change-house and
the cluster of cottages round the Laird's
lodge, like the clachan of TuUy Veolan.
But these plain remnants of the old
Scotch towns are almost buried in a
multitude of ' smoky dwarf houses ' —
a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has
found the fitting phrase for these
dwellings, once for all. All over the
Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned :
I think they are filthiest below Hawick ;
but this may be mere local prejudice in
a Selkirk man. To keep them clean
costs money ; and, though improvements

SIJ^ WALTER SCOTT 157

are often promised, I cannot see much
change for the better. Abbotsford,
luckily, is above Galashiels, and only
receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk,
Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen.
On the other hand, your ill-omened later
dwelling, * the unhappy palace of your
race,' is overlooked by villas that prick a
cockney ear among their larches, hotels
of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a
strange place. Whisky is exiled from
some of our caravanserais, and they have
banished Sir John Barleycorn. It seems
as if the views of the excellent critic (who
wrote your life lately, and said you had
left no descendants, le pauvre Jioinme /)
were beginning to prevail. This pious
biographer was greatly shocked by that
capital story about the keg of whisky
that arrived at the Liddesdale farmer's
during family prayers. Your Toryism
also was an offence to him.

Among these vicissitudes of things
and the overthrow of customs, let us be
thankful that, beyond the reach of the

158 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

manufacturers, the Border country re-
mains as kind and homely as ever. I
looked at Ashiestiel some days ago : the
house seemed just as it may have been
when you left it for Abbotsford, only
there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn,
the hill on the opposite bank of the
Tweed was covered to the crest with
turnips, and the burn did not sing below
the little bridge, for in this arid summer
the burn was dry. But there was still
a grilse that rose to a big March brown
in the shrunken stream below Elibank.
This may not interest you, who styled
yourself

No fisher,

But a well-wisher

To the game !

Still, as when you were thinking over
Marmion, a man might have ' grand
gallops among the hills ' — those grave
wastes of heather and bent that sever
all the watercourses and roll their sheep-
covered pastures from Dollar Law to

SIR WALTER SCOTT 159

White Combe, and from White Combe
to the Three Brethren Cairn and the
Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes,
Teviotdale is pleasant still, and there is
not a drop of dye in the water, purior
electro, of Yarrow. St. Mary's Loch lies
beneath me, smitten with wind and rain
—the St. Mary's of North and of the
Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a
myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than
of yore. The Shepherd could no longer
fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much
of a size that the country people took
them for herrings.

The grave of Piers Cockburn is still
not desecrated : hard by it lies, within a
little wood ; and beneath that slab of
old sandstone, and the graven letters,
and the sword and shield, sleep ' Piers
Cockburn and Marjory his wife.' Not
a hundred yards off was the castle-door
where they hanged him ; this is the
tomb of the ballad, and the lady that
buried him rests now with her wild
lord.

i6o- LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,

When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair ;

Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,

When I turned about and went my way ! ^

Here too hearts have broken, and there
is a sacredness in the shadow and
beneath these clustering berries of the
rowan-trees. That sacredness, that re-
verent memory of our old land, it is
always and inextricably blended with
our memories, with our thoughts, with
our love of you. Scotchmen, methinks,

' Lord Napier and Ettrick points out to me that,
unluckily, the tradition is erroneous. Piers was
not executed at all. William Cockburn suffered in
Edinburgh. But the Border Minstrelsy overrides
history.

Criminal Trials in Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn,
Esq. Vol. i. part i. p. 144, a.d. 1530. 17 Jac. V.

May 16. William Cokburne of Henderland, con-
victed (in presence of the King) of high treason com-
mitted by him in bringing Alexander Forestare and
his son, Englishmen, to the plundering of Archibald
Somervile ; and for treasonably bringing certain
Englishmen to the lands of Glenquhome ; and for
common theft, common reset of theft, out-putting and
in-putting thereof. Sentence. For which causes and
crimes he has forfeited his life, lands, and goods,
movable and immovable ; which shall be escheated
to the King. Beheaded.

SIR WALTER SCOTT i6i

who owe so much to you, owe you most
for the example you gave of the beauty
of a life of honour, showing them what,
by heaven's blessing, a Scotchman still
might be.

Words, empty and unavailing — for
what words of ours can speak our
thoughts or interpret our affections !
From you first, as we followed the deer
with King James, or rode with William
of Deloraine on his midnight errand, did
we learn what Poetry means and all the
happiness that is in the gift of song.
This and more than may be told you
gave us, that are not forgetful, not un-
grateful, though our praise be unequal
to our gratitude. Fungor inam nmnefe !

M

i62 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XVI.

To Ensebiiis of CcEsarea.

(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN.)

Touching the Gods of the Heathen,
most reverend Father, thou art not
ignorant that even now, as in the time of
thy probation on earth, there is great
dissension. That these feigned Deities
and idols, the work of men's hands, are no
longer worshipped thou knowest ; neither
do men eat meat offered to idols. Even
as spake that last Oracle which mur-
mured forth, the latest and the only-
true voice from Delphi, even so 'the
fair-wrought court divine hath fallen ; no
more hath Phoebus his home, no more
his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of
water; nay, the sweet- voiced water is
silent.' The fane is ruinous, and the
images of men's idolatry are dust.

EUSEBIUS OF CMS A RE A 163

Nevertheless, most worshipful, men
do still dispute about the beginnings of
those sinful Gods : such as Zeus, Athene,
and Dionysus : and marvel how first they
won their dominion over the souls of
the foolish peoples. Now, concerning
these things there is not one belief, but
many ; howbeit, there are two main
kinds of opinion. One sect of philoso-
phers believes — as thyself, with heavenly
learning, didst not vainly persuade — that
the Gods were the inventions of wild
and bestial folk, who, long before cities
were builded or life was honourably
ordained, fashioned forth evil spirits in
their own savage likeness ; ay, or in the
likeness of the very beasts that perish.
To this judgment, as it is set forth in
thy Book of the Preparation for the
Gospel, I, humble as I am, do give my
consent. But on the other side are
many and learned men, chiefly of the
tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost
conquered the whole inhabited world.
These, being unwilling to suppose that

M 2

1 64 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

the Hellenes were in bondage to super-
stitions handed down from times of utter
darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly
hold with the heathen philosophers, even
with the writers whom thou, most vene-
rable, didst confound with thy wisdom
and chasten with the scourge of small
cords of thy wit.

Thus, like the heathen, our doctors
and teachers maintain that the gods of
the nations were, in the beginning, such
pure natural creatures as the blue sky,
the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and
the fire ; but, as time went on, men,
forgetting the meaning of their own
speech and no longer understanding
the tongue of their own fathers, were
misled and beguiled into fashioning all
those lamentable tales : as that Zeus, for
love of mortal women, took the shape
of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an
eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is
a shame even to speak of

Behold, then, most worshipful, how
these doctors and learned men argue,

EUSEBIUS OF C^SAREA 165

even like the philosophers of the heathen
whom thou didst confound. For they
declare the gods to have been natural
elements, sun and sky and storm, even
as did thy opponents ; and, like them,
as thou saidst, ' they are nowise at one
with each other in their explanations.'
For of old some boasted that Hera was
the Air ; and some that she signified
the love of woman and man ; and some
that she was the waters above the Earth ;
and others that she was the Earth be-
neath the waters ; and yet others that
she was the Night, for that Night is the
shadow of Earth : as if, forsooth, the
men who first worshipped Hera had
understanding of these things ! And
when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly
(as Homer declareth), this meant (said
the learned in thy days) no more than
the strife and confusion of the elements,
and was not in the beginning an idle slan-
derous tale.

To all which, most worshipful, thou
didst answer wisely : saying that Hera

1 66 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

could not be both night, and earth, and
water, and air, and the love of sexes,
and the confusion of the elements ; but
that all these opinions were vain dreams,
and the guesses of the learned. And
why — thou saidst — even if the Gods were
pure natural creatures, are such foul
things told of them in the Mysteries as '
it is not fitting for me to declare. * These
wanderings, and drinkings, and loves,
and seductions, that would be shameful
in men, why,' thou saidst, 'were they
attributed to the natural elements ; and
wherefore did the Gods constantly show
themselves, like the sorcerers called were-
wolves, in the shape of the perishable
beasts } ' But, mainly, thou didst argue
that, till the philosophers of the heathen
were agreed among themselves, not all
contradicting each the other, they had
no semblance of a sure foundation for
their doctrine.

To all this and more, most worshipful
Father, I know not what the heathen
answered thee. But, in our time, the

EUSEBIUS OF C^SAREA 167

learned men who stand to it that the
heathen Gods were in the beginning the
pure elements, and that the nations,
forgetting their first love and the sig-
nificance of their own speech, became
confused and were betrayed into foul
stories about the pure Gods — these
learned men, I say, agree no whit among
themselves. Nay, they differ one from
another, not less than did Plutarch and
Porphyry and Theagenes, and the rest
whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear
with me, Father, while I tell thee how
the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do
contend among themselves ; and yet
these differences of theirs they call
* Science ' !

Consider the goddess Athene, who
sprang armed from the head of Zeus,
even as — among the fables of the poor
heathen folk of seas thou never knewest
— goddesses are fabled to leap out from
the armpits or feet of their fathers.
Thou must know that what Plato, in
the ' Cratylus,' made Socrates say in jest,

1 68 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

the learned among us practise in sad
earnest. For, when they wish to explain
the nature of any God, they first examine
his name, and torment the letters there-
of, arranging and altering them according
to their will, and flying off to the speech
of the Indians and Medesand Chaldeans,
and other Barbarians, if Greek will not
serve their turn. How saith Socrates ?
* I bethink me of a very new and ingeni-
ous idea that occurs to me ; and, if I
do not mind, I shall be wiser than I
should be by to-morrow's dawn. My
notion is that we may put in and pull out
letters at pleasure and alter the accents.'
Even so do the learned — not at
pleasure, maybe, but according to certain
fixed laws (so they declare) ; yet none
the more do they agree among them-
selves. And I deny not that they
discover many things true and good to
be known ; but, as touching the names
of the Gods, their learning, as it stand-
eth, is confusion. Look, then, at the
goddess Athene : taking one example

EUSEBIUS OF CyESAREA 169

out of hundreds. We have dwelHng in
our coasts Muellerus, the most erudite
of the doctors of the Alemannij and
the most golden-mouthed. Concerning
Athene, he saith that her name is none
other than, in the ancient tongue of the
Brachmanse, Ahaiid, which, being inter-
preted, means the Dawn. * And that
the morning light,' saith he, ' offers the
best starting-point for the later growth
of Athene has been proved, I believe,
beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil.' ^
Yet this same doctor candidly lets
us know that another of his nation, the
witty Benfeius, hath devised another
sense and origin of Athene, taken from
the speech of the old Medes. But
Muellerus declares to us that whosoever
shall examine the contention of Benfeius
* will be bound, in common honesty,
to confess that it is untenable.' This,
Father, is * one for Benfeius,' as the
saying goes. And as Muellerus holds

' 'The Lesson of ]\v^\itx.'' —Nineteenth Century^
October 1885.

170 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

that these matters ' admit of almost
mathematical precision,' it would seem
that Benfeius is but a Diimmkopf, as the
Alemanni say, in their own language,
when they would be pleasant among
themselves.

Now, wouldst thou credit it ? despite
the mathematical plainness of the facts,
other Alemanni agree neither with
Muellerus, nor yet with Benfeius, and
will neither hear that Athene was the
Dawn, nor yet that she is ' the feminine
of the Zend Thrdetdna athwydna! Lo,
you ! how Prellerus goes about to show
that her name is drawn not from
A hand and the old Brachmanae, nor
athivydna and the old Medes, but from
' the root alQy whence aWrjp, the air, or
aOy whence avOos, a flower.' Yea, and
Prellerus will have it that no man knows
the verity of this matter. None the less
he is very bold, and will none of the
Dawn ; but holds to it that Athene
was, from the first, * the clear pure height

£ USE EJUS OF CALSAREA 171

of the Air, which is exceeding pure in
Attica.'

Now, Father, as if all this were not
enough, comes one Roscherus in, with
a mighty great volume on the Gods,
and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for
his ally. And these doctors will neither
with Rueckertus and Hermannus, take
Athene for * wisdom in person ; ' nor
with Welckerus and Prellerus, for ' the
goddess of air ;' nor even, with Muellerus
and mathematical certainty, for 'the
Morning-Red : ' but they say that Athene
is the ' black thunder-cloud, and the
lightning that leapeth therefrom ' ! I
make no doubt that other Alemanni
are of other minds : quot Alemanni tot
senienti(E.

Yea, as thou saidst of the learned
heathen, Ovhs ^yap aWrfKois avficpoyva
<f)vato\oyov(7iv. Yet these disputes of
theirs they call * Science ' I But if any
man says to the learned : * Best of men,
you are erudite, and laborious and
witty ; but, till you are more of the same

172 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

mind, your opinions cannot be styled
knowledge. Nay, they are at present
of no avail whereon to found any doc-
trine concerning the Gods ' — that man
is railed at for his ' mean ' and ' weak '
arguments.

Was it thus, Father, that the heathen
railed against thee ? But I must still
believe, with thee, that these evil tales
of the Gods were invented ' when man's
life was yet brutish and wandering ' (as
is the life of many tribes that even now
tell like tales), and were maintained in
honour by the later Greeks 'because
none dared alter the ancient beliefs of
his ancestors.' Farewell, Father ; and
all good be with thee, wishes thy well-
wisher and thy disciple.

73

XVII.

To Percy Bysslie Shelley.

Sir, — In your lifetime on earth you
were not more than commonly curious
as to what was said by ' the herd of
mankind,' if I may quote your own
phrase. It was that of one who loved his
fellow-men, but did not in his less enthu-
siastic moments overestimate their vir-
tues and their discretion. Removed so
far away from our hubbub, and that world
where, as you say, we ' pursue our serious
folly as of old,' you are, one may guess,
but moderately concerned about the fate
of your writings and your reputation. As
to the first, you have somewhere said, in
one of your letters, that the final judg-
ment on your merits as a poet is in the
hands of ^sterity, and that you fear
the verdict will be * Guilty,' and the

174 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

sentence ' Death.' Such apprehensions
cannot have been fixed or frequent in
the mind of one whose genius burned
always with a clearer and steadier flame
to the last. The jury o{ which you
spoke has met : a mixed jury and a
merciful. The verdict is ' Well done,'
and the sentence Immortality of Fame.
There have been, there are, dissenters ;
yet probably they will be less and less
heard as the years go on.

One judge, or juryman, has made
up his mind that prose was your true
province, and that your letters will out-
live your lays. I know not whether it
was the same or an equally well-inspired
critic, who spoke of your most perfect
lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his
ill-tied cravats) as ' a gallery of your
failures.' But the general voice does
not echo these utterances of a too
subtle intellect. At a famous Univer-
sity (not your own) once existed a band
of men known as 'The Trinity Sniffers.'
Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 175

still inspire some of the jurors who from
time to time make themselves heard in
your case. The * Quarterly Review,' I
fear, is still unreconciled. It regards
your attempts as tainted by the spirit
of * The Liberal Movement in English
Literature ; ' and it is impossible, alas !
to maintain with any success that you
were a Throne and Altar Tory. At
Oxford you are forgiven ; and the old
rooms where you let the oysters burn
(was not your founder, King Alfred,
once guilty of similar negligence ?) are
now shown to pious pilgrims.

But Conservatives, 'tis rumoured, are
still averse to your opinions, and are
believed to prefer to yours the works of
the Reverend Mr. Keble, and, indeed, of
the clergy in general. But, in spite of
all this, your poems, like the affections
of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet
* in the mouths of all, and chiefly on
the lips of the young.' It is in your
lyrics that you live, and I do not mean
that every one could pass an examina-

176 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

tion in the plot of ' Prometheus Un-
bound.' Talking of this piece, by the
way, a Cambridge critic finds that it
reveals in you a hankering after life
in a cave — doubtless an unconscious-
ly inherited memory from cave-man.
Speaking of cave-man reminds me that
you once spoke of deserting song for
prose, and of producing a history of
the moral, intellectual, and political
elements in human society, which, we
now agree, began, as Asia would fain
have ended, in a cave.

Fortunately you gave us * Adonais '
and ' Hellas ' instead of this treatise, and
we have now successfully written the
natural history of Man for ourselves.
Science tells us that before becoming a
cave-dweller he was a Brute ; Experience
daily proclaims that he constantly reverts
to his original condition. Lhonime est
tin mechant animal^ in spite of your boy-
ish efforts to add pretty girls ' to the list
of the good, the disinterested, and the
free.'

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 177

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation,
nor the sterile din of Politics, were * the
haunts meet for thee.' Watching the
yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the
reflected pine forest in the water-pools,
watching the sunset as it faded, and the
dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair
and fleeting things into a tissue where
light and music were at one, that was
the task of Shelley ! ' To ask you for
anything human,' you said, 'was like
asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.'
Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and
Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give
us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar.
Each poet gives what he has, and what
he can offer ; you spread before us fairy
bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we
turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all
the multitudes of singers, one is spiritual
and strange, one has seen Artemis un-
veiled } One, like Anchises, has been
beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes,
when he looks on the common world
of common men, are, like the eyes of

N

178 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Anchises, blind with excess of light. Let
Shelley sing of what he saw, what none
saw but Shelley !

Notwithstanding the popularity of
your poems (the most romantic of
things didactic), our world is no better
than the world you knew. This will
disappoint you, who had * a passion for
reforming it.' Kings and priests are
very much where you left them. True,
we have a poet who assails them, at
large, frequently and fearlessly ; yet Mr.
Swinburne has never, like ' kind Hunt,'
been in prison, nor do we fear for him a
charge of treason. Moreover, chemical
science has discovered new and ingeni-
ous ways of destroying principalities
and powers. You would be interested
in the methods, but your peaceful Re-
volutionism, which disdained physical
force, would regret their application.

Our foreign affairs are not in a state
which even you would consider satis-
factory ; for we have just had to contend
with a Revolt of Islam, and we still find

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 179

in Russia exactly the qualities which
you recognised and described. We have
a great statesman whose methods and
eloquence somewhat resemble those you
attribute to Laon and Prince Atha-
nase. Alas ! he is a youth of more than
seventy summers ; and not in his time
will Prometheus retire to a cavern and
pass a peaceful millennium in twining
buds and beams.

In domestic affairs most of the Re-
fornis you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emanci-
pation, and almost everything else she
can ask for. I regret to say that she is
still unhappy ; her wounds unstanched,
her wrongs unforgiven. At home we
have enfranchised the paupers, and expect
the most happy results. Paupers (as
Mr. Gladstone says) are * our own flesh
and blood,' and, as we compel them to
be vaccinated, so we should permit them
to vote. Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse
Collings (how you would have loved
that man !) has a Bill for extending the

N 2

i8o LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

priceless boon of the vote to inmates of
Pauper Lunatic Asylums? This may-
prove that last element in the Elixir of
political happiness which we have long
sought in vain. Atheists, you will re-
gret to hear, are still unpopular ; but
the new Parliament has done something
for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have
known our Charles while you were in
the ' Queen Mab ' stage. I fear you
wandered, later, from his robust con-
dition of intellectual development.

As to your private life, many bio-
graphers contrive to make public as
much of it as possible. Your name,
even in life, was, alas ! a kind of duc-
dame to bring people of no very great
sense into your circle. This curious
fascination has attracted round your
memory a feeble folk of commentators,
biographers, anecdotists, and others of
the tribe. They swarm round you like
carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like
night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men
of sense and taste have written on you.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY i8i

indeed ; but your weaker admirers are
now disputing as to whether it was your
heart, or a less dignified and most trou-
blesome organ, which escaped the flames
of the funeral pyre. These biographers
fight terribly among themselves, and
vainly prolong the memory of * old un-
happy far-off things, and sorrows long
ago.' Let us leave them and their
squabbles over what is unessential, their
raking up of old letters and old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary
laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by
him ' The Real Shelley.' The real Shel-
ley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived
of by a worthy gentleman so prejudiced
and so skilled in taking up things by
the wrong handle that I wonder he has
not made a name in the exact science of
Comparative Mythology. He criticises
you in the spirit of that Christian
Apologist, the Englishman who called
you 'a damned Atheist' in the post-
office at Pisa. He finds that you had

1 82 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

*a little turned-up nose,' a feature no
less important in his system than was
the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To
be in harmony with your nose, you were
a ' phenomenal ' liar, an ill-bred, ill-born,
profligate, partly insane, an evil-tem-
pered monster, a self-righteous person,
full of self-approbation — in fact you
were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered
and scurrilous apothecary, ' a bad old
man.' But enough of this inopportune
brawler.

For Humanity, of which you hoped
such great things, Science predicts ex-
tinction in a night of Frost. The sun
will grow cold, slowly — as slowly as
doom came on Jupiter in your ' Prome-
theus,' but as surely. If this nightmare
be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in
some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equa-
tor, will read, by a fading lamp charged
with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the
poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 183

latest of his race, will not wholly be de-
prived of those sights which alone (says
the nameless Greek) make life worth en-
during. In your verse he will have sight
of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of
dawn and the gloom of earthquake and
eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy,
with the great powers that are dead, sun,
and ocean, and the illimitable azure of
the heavens. In Shelley's poetry, while
Man endures, all those will survive ; for
your * voice is as the voice of winds and
tides,' and perhaps more deathless than
all of these, and only perishable with the
perishing of the human spirit.

1 84 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XVIII.

To Monsieur de Moliere, Valet de
Chambre du Roi.

Monsieur, — With what awe does a
writer venture into the presence of the
great Moli^re ! As a courtier in your
time would scratch humbly (with his
comb !) at the door of the Grand Mon-
arch, so I presume to draw near your
dwelling among the Immortals. You,
like the king who, among all his titles,
has now none so proud as that of the
friend of Moliere — you found your do-
minions small, humble, and distracted ;
you raised them to the dignity of an
empire : what Louis XIV. did for France
you achieved for French comedy ; and
the baton of Scapin still wields its
sway though the sword of Louis was
broken at Blenheim. For the King

MONSIEUR DE MO LI ERE 185

the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased
to exist ; by a more magnificent con-
quest you overcame the Channel. If
England vanquished your country's arms,
it was through you that France ferum
victorem cepit, and restored the dynasty
of Comedy to the land whence she
had been driven. Ever since Dryden
borrowed 'L'Etourdi,' our tardy apish
nation has lived (in matters theatrical)
on the spoils of the wits of France.

In one respect, to be sure, times
and manners have altered. While you
lived, taste kept the French drama pure ;
and it was the congenial business of
English playwrights to foist their rustic
grossness and their large Fescennine
jests into the urban page • of Moliere.
Now they are diversely occupied ; and
it is their affair to lend modesty where
they borrow wit, and to spare a blush
to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.
But still, as has ever been our wont
since Etherege saw, and envied, and
imitated your successes — still we pilfer

1 86 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

the plays of France, and take our bien^
as you said in your lordly manner,
wherever we can find it. We are the
privateers of the stage ; and it is rarely,
to be sure, that a comedy pleases the
town which has not first been ' cut out '
from the countrymen of Moliere. Why
this should be, and what ' tenebriferous
star ' (as Paracelsus, your companion in
the * Dialogues des Morts,' would have
believed) thus darkens the sun of English
humour, we know not ; but certainly
our dependence on France is the sin-
cerest tribute to you. Without you,
neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor 'a
wilderness of monkeys ' like Scarron,
could ever have given Comedy to France
and restored her to Europe.

While we owe to you. Monsieur, the
beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and
beneficent as Peace in the play of Aris-
tophanes, it is still to you that we must
turn when of comedies we desire the
best. If you studied with daily and
nightly care the works of Plautus and

MONSIEUR DE MO LI ERE 187

Terence, if you ' let no musty bouquin
escape you ' (so your enemies declared),
it was to some purpose that you laboured.
Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all
who came before you ; and from those
that follow, however fresh, we turn : we
turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais,
from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from
Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to
that crowded world of your creations.
' Creations ' one may well say, for you
anticipated Nature herself: you gave us,
before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau
who was a gentleman not a lacquey ; in
a mot of Don Juan's, the secret of the
new Religion and the watchword of
Comte, r amour de rhumanite.

Before you where can we find, save
in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour ;
and where, unless it be in Montaigne,
the wise philosophy of a secular civili-
sation ? With a heart the most tender,
delicate, loving, and generous, a heart
often in agony and torment, you had
to make life endurable (we cannot doubt

1 88 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

it) without any whisper of promise, or
hope, or warning from Religion. Yes,
in an age when the greatest mind of all,
the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the
only help was in voluntary blindness,
that the only chance was to hazard all
on a bet at evens, you. Monsieur, refused
to be blinded, or to pretend to see what
you found invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise
of help. When the Jesuits and Jansen-
ists of your time saw, each of them, in
Tartufe the portrait of their rivals (as
each of the laughable Marquises in your
play conceived that you were girding
at his neighbour), you all the while
were mocking every credulous excess
of Faith In the sermons preached to
Agnes we surely hear your private
laughter ; in the arguments for credulity
which are presented to Don Juan by
his valet we listen to the eternal self-
defence of superstition. Thus, desolate
of belief, you sought for the permanent
element of life — precisely where Pascal

MONSIEUR DE MOLIERE 189

recognised all that was most fleeting and
unsubstantial — in divertissement ; in the
pleasure of looking on, a spectator of
the accidents of existence, an observer
of the follies of mankind. Like the Gods
of the Epicurean, you seem to regard
our life as a play that is played, as a
comedy ; yet how often the tragic note
comes in ! What pity, and in the
laughter what an accent of tears, as of
rain in the wind ! No comedian has
been so kindly and human as you ; none
has had a heart, like you, to feel for his
butts, and to leave them sometimes,
in a sense, superior to their tormentors.
Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George
Dandin, and the rest — our sympathy,
somehow, is with them, after all ; and
M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman,
despite his misadventures.

Though triumphant Youth and ma-
licious Love in your plays may batter
and defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet
they have not all the victory, or you
did not mean that they should win

190 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

it. They go off with laughter, and their
victim with a grimace ; but in him we,
that are past our youth, behold an actor
in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a
generation. Your sympathy is not wholly
with the dogs that are having their day ;
you can throw a bone or a crust to the
dog that has had his, and has been
taught that it is over and ended. Your-
self not unlearned in shame, in jealousy,
in endurance of the wanton pride of
men (how could the poor player and
the husband of Celimene be untaught
in that experience ?), you never sided
quite heartily, as other comedians have
done, with young prosperity and rank
and power.

I am not the first who has dared to
approach you in the Shades ; for just
after your own death the author of ' Les
Dialogues des Morts ' gave you Paracelsus
as a companion, and the author of ' Le
Jugement de Pluton ' made the ' mighty
warder ' decide that * Moliere should
not talk philosophy.' These writers.

MONSIEUR DE MOLIERE 191

like most of us, feel that, after all, the
comedies of the Conternplateur, of the
translator of Lucretius, are a philosophy
of life in themselves, and that in them
we read the lessons of human experience
writ small and clear.

What comedian but Moliere has com-
bined with such depths — with the indig-
nation of Alceste, the self-deception of
Tartufe, the blasphemy of Don Juan —
such wildness of irresponsible mirth,
such humour, such wit ! Even now,
when more than two hundred years have
sped by, when so much water has flowed
under the bridges and has borne away
so many trifles of contemporary mirth
{cetera fluminis ritu feruniur), even now
we never laugh so well as when Mas-
carille and Vadius and M. Jourdain
tread the boards in the Maison de
Moliere. Since those mobile dark brows
of yours ceased to make men laugh,
since your voice denounced the ' demo-
niac ' manner of contemporary tragedians,
I take leave to think that no player has

192 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

been more worthy to wear the caiions
of Mascarille or the gown of Vadius
than M. Coquelin of the Comedie
Frangaise. In him you have a successor
to your Mascarille so perfect, that the
ghosts of playgoers of your date might
cry, could they see him, that Moliere
had come again. But, with all respect
to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if
Mdlle. Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette her-
self, would reconcile the town to the
loss of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine,
and the first, the true C^limene, Ar-
mande. Yet had you ever so merry a
soubrette as Mdme. Samary, so exqui-
site a Nicole ?

Denounced, persecuted, and buried
hugger-mugger two hundred years ago,
you are now not over-praised, but more
worshipped, with more servility and
ostentatioft, studied with more prying
curiosity than you may approve. Are
not the Molieristes a body who carry
adoration to fanaticism } Any scrap of
your handwriting (so few are these),

MONSIEUR DE MO LIE RE 193

any anecdote even remotely touching
on your life, any fact that may prove
your house was numbered 15 not 22, is
eagerly seized and discussed by your
too minute historians. Concerning your
private life, these men often speak more
like malicious enemies than friends ; re-
peating the fabulous scandals of Le
Boulanger, and trying vainly to sup-
port them by grubbing in dusty parish
registers. It is most necessary to defend
you from your friends — from such friends
as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene
Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-
headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek
the living among the dead, and the
immortal Moliere among the sweepings
of attorneys' offices. As I regard them
(for I have tarried in their tents) and
as I behold their trivialities — the exer-
cises of men who neglect Moliere's works
to gossip about Moliere's great-grand-
mother's second-best bed — I sometimes
wish that Moliere were here to write
on his devotees a new comedy, ' Les

O

194 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Molieristes.' How fortunate were they,
Monsieur, who lived and worked with
you, who saw you day by day, who
were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by
the kindest loyalty to the best and most
honourable of men, the most open-
handed in friendship, in charity the
most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy !
Ah, that for one day I could behold you,
writing in the study, rehearsing on the
stage, musing in the lace-seller's shop,
strolling through the Palais, turning
over the new books at Billaine's, dusting
your ruffles among the old volumes on
the sunny stalls. Would that, through
the ages, we could hear you after supper,
merry with Boileau, and with Racine, —
not yet a traitor, — laughing over Chape-
lain, combining to gird at him in an
epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talk-
ing your favourite philosophy, mind-
ful of Descartes. Surely of all the wits
none was ever so good a man, none
ever made life so rich with humour and
friendship.

195

XIX.

To Robert Burns.

Sir, — Among men of Genius, and
especially among Poets, there are some
to whom we turn \vith a peculiar and
unfeigned affection ; there are others
whom we admire rather than love. By
some we are won with our will, by others
conquered against our desire. It has
been your peculiar fortune to capture
the hearts of a whole people— a people
not usually prone to praise, but devoted
with a personal and patriotic loyalty to
you and to your reputation. In you
every Scot who is a Scot sees, admires,
and compliments Himself, his ideal self
— independent, fond of whisky, fonder of
the lassies ; you are the true representa-
tive of him and of his nation. Next
year will be the hundredth since the

196 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

press of Kilmarnock brought to light
its solitary masterpiece, your Poems ;
and next year, therefore, methinks, the
revenue will receive a welcome accession
from the abundance of whisky drunk in
your honour. It is a cruel thing for any
of your countrymen to feel that, where
all the rest love, he can only admire ;
where all the rest are idolators, he may
not bend the knee ; but stands apart and
beats upon his breast, observing, not
adoring — a critic. Yet to some of us —
petty souls, perhaps, and envious— that
loud indiscriminating praise of ' Robbie
Burns' (for so they style you in their
Change-house familiarity) has long been
ungrateful ; and, among the treasures of
your songs, we venture to select and even
to reject. So it must be ! We cannot
all love Haggis, nor*painch, tripe, and
thairm,' and all those rural dainties
which you celebrate as ' warm-reekin,
rich ! ' ' Rather too rich,' as the Young
Lady said on an occasion recorded by
Sam Weller.

ROBERT BURNS 197

Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware

That jaups in luggies ;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer,

Gie her a Haggis !

You have given her a Haggis, with a
vengeance, and her ' gratefu' prayer ' is
yours for ever. But if even an eternity
of partridge may pall on the epicure, so
of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights,
Cometh satiety at last. And yet what a
glorious Haggis it is — the more em-
phatically rustic and even Fescennine
part of your verse ! We have had many
a rural bard since Theocritus * watched
the visionary flocks,' but you are the
only one of them all who has spoken
the sincere Doric. Yours is the talk of
the byre and the plough-tail ; yours is
that large utterance of the early hinds.
Even Theocritus minces matters, save
where Lacon and Comatas quite out-
do the swains of Ayrshire. ' But thee,
Theocritus, wha matches ? ' you ask, and
yourself out-match him in this wide rude
region, trodden only by the rural Muse.
' lliy rural loves are nature's sel' ; ' and

198 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

the wooer of Jean Armour speaks more
like a true shepherd than the elegant
Daphnis of the ' Oaristys.'

Indeed it is with this that moral
critics of your life reproach you, for-
getting, perhaps, that in your amours
you were but as other Scotch ploughmen
and shepherds of the past and present.
Ettrick may still, with Afghanistan, offer
matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your
antithesis, and the complement of the
Scotch character) supposed ; but the
morals of Ettrick are those of rural
Sicily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your
days. Over these matters the Kirk,
with all her power, and the Free Kirk
too, have had absolutely no influence
whatever. To leave so delicate a topic,
you were but as other swains, or, as
' that Birkie ca'd a lord,' Lord Byron ;
only you combined (in certain of your
letters) a libertine theory with your
practice ; you poured out in song your
audacious raptures, your half-hearted
repentance, your shame and your scorn.

ROBERT BURNS 199

You spoke the truth about rural Hves
and loves. We may like it or dislike it ;
but we cannot deny the verity.

Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir,
for you, as it was fortunate for Letters
and for Scotland, that you were born at
the meeting of two ages and of two
worlds — precisely in the moment when
bookish literature was beginning to reach
the people, and when Society was first
learning to admit the low-born to her
Minor Mysteries? Before you how
many singers not less truly poets than
yourself — though less versatile not less
passionate, though less sensuous not less
simple — had been born and had died in
poor men's cottages ! There abides not
even the shadow of a name of the old
Scotch song-smiths, of the old ballad-
makers. The authors of Clerk Saunders,'
of ' The Wife of Usher's Well,' of ' Fair
Annie,' and * Sir Patrick Spens,' and
' The Bonny Hind,' are as unknown to
us as Homer, whom in their directness
and force they resemble. They never,

J

200 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

perhaps, gave their poems to writing ;
certainly they never gave them to the
press. On the lips and in the hearts of
the people they have their lives ; and
the singers, after a life obscure and
untroubled by society or by fame, are
forgotten. ' The Iniquity of Oblivion
blindly scattereth his Poppy.'

Had you been born some years earlier
you would have been even as these un-
named Immortals, leaving great verses
to a little clan — verses retained only by
Memory. You would have been but
the minstrel of your native valley : the
wider world would not have known you,
nor you the world. Great thoughts of
independence and revolt would never
have burned in you ; indignation would
not have vexed you. Society would not
have given and denied her caresses. You
would have been happy. Your songs
would have lingered in all ' the circle of
the summer hills ; ' and your scorn, your
satire, your narrative verse, would have
been unwritten or unknown. To the

ROBERT BURNS 201

world what a loss ! and what a gain to
you ! We should have possessed but a
few of your lyrics, as

When o'er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo ;

And owsen frae the furrowed field,
Return sae dowf and wearie O !

How noble that is, how natural, how un-
consciously Greek ! You found, oddly,
in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the
Tenth Muse :

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
Even Sappho's flame !

But how unconsciously you remind us
both of Sappho and of Homer in these
strains about the Evening Star and the
hour when the Day fisrevicrcreTo ^ov\v-
TovSs? Had you lived and died the
pastoral poet of some silent glen, such
lyrics could not but have survived ; free,
too, of all that in your songs reminds us
of the Poet's Corner in the ' Kirkcudbright
Advertiser.' We should not have read
how

Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning,
Banishes ilk darksome shade !

202 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Still we might keep a love-poem un-
excelled by Catullus,

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met — or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Btrt the letters to Clarinda would have
been unwritten, and the thrush would
have been untaught in *the style of the
Bird of Paradise.'

A quiet life of song, fallentis seimta
vitcBy was not to be yours. Fate other-
wise decreed it. The touch of a lettered
society, the strife with the Kirk, discon-
tent with the State, poverty and pride,
neglect and success, were needed to
make your Genius what it was, and to
endow the world with ' Tam o' Shanter,'
the * Jolly Beggars,' and ' Holy Willie's
Prayer.' Who can praise them too highly
— who admire in them too much the
humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the
unsurpassed energy and courage .'' So
powerful, so commanding, is the move-
ment of that Beggars' Chorus, that,

ROBERT BURNS 203

methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the
brain of our greatest living poet when he
conceived the ' Vision of Sin.' You shall
judge for yourself Recall :

Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets !

Here's to all the wandering train !
Here's our ragged bairns and callets !

One and all cry out. Amen !

A fig for those by law protected !

Liberty's a glorious feast !
Courts for cowards were erected !

Churches built to please the priest !

Then read this :

Drink to lofty hopes that cool —

Visions of a perfect state :
Drink we, last, the public fool,

Frantic love and frantic hate.

Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,

While we keep a little breath !
Drink to heavy Ignorance,

Hob and nob with brother Death !

Is not the movement the same, though
the modern speaks a wilder recklessness ?
So in the best company we leave you,
who were the life and soul of so much
company, good and bad. No poet, since

204 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the
world more assurance of a man ; none
lived a life more strenuous, engaged
in an eternal conflict of the passions,
and by them overcome — ' mighty and
mightily fallen.' When we think of you,
Byron seems, as Plato would have said,
remote by one degree from actual truth,
and Musset by a degree more remote
than Byron.

205

XX.

To Lord Byron.

My Lord,

(Do you remember how Leigh
Hunt
Enraged you once by writing My dear
Byron ?)
Books have their fates, — as mortals
have who punt.
And yotirs have entered on an age of
iron.
Critics there be who think your satire
blunt.
Your pathos, fudge ; such perils must

environ
Poets who in their time were quite the

rage.
Though now there's not a soul to turn
their page.

2o6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Yes, there is much dispute about your
worth,
And much is said which you might
like to know
By modern poets here upon the earth.
Where poets live, and love each other
so ;
And, in Elysium, it may move your
mirth
To hear of bards that pitch your praises
low.
Though there be some that for your credit
stickle,
As —Glorious Mat, — and not inglorious
Nichol.

(This kind of writing is my pet aversion,
I hate the slang, I hate the personali-
ties,
I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dis-
persion.
Of every rhyme that in the singer's
wallet is,
I hate it as you hated the Excursion^
But, while no man a hero to his valet is.

LORD BYRON - 207

The hero's still the model ; I indite
The kind of rhymes that Byron oft
would write.)

There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot

rhyme to,
One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim

and prim.
Of him there's much to say, if I had

time to
Concern myself in any wise with him.
He seems to hate the heights he cannot

climb to,
He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's

whim,
A good deal of his sawdust he has

spilt on
Shakespeare, and Moliere, and you, and

Milton.

Ay, much his temper is like Vivien's
mood.
Which found not Galahad pure, nor
Lancelot brave ;
Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood.
He buries poets in an icy grave,

2o8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

His Essays — he of the Genevan hood !
Nothing so fine, but better doth he

crave.
So stupid and so solemn in his spite
He dares to print that Moliere could

not write !

Enough of these excursions ; I was say-
ing
That half our English Bards are
turned Reviewers,
And Arnold was discussing and assaying
The weight and value of that work of
yours,
Examining and testing it and weighing,
And proved, the gems are pure, the
gold endures.
While Swinburne cries with an exceeding

The stones are paste, and half the gold,
alloy.

In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest
force,
Poetic, in this later age of ours ;

LORD BYRON 209

His song, a torrent from a mountain

source,
Clear as the crystal, singing with the

showers.
Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course
Through banks o'erhung with rocks

and sweet with flowers ;
None of your brooks that modestly

meander,
But swift as Awe along the Pass of

Brander.

And when our century has clomb its crest.
And backward gazes o'er the plains of
Time,
And counts its harvest, yours is still
the best.
The richest garner in the field of rhyme
(The metaphoric mixture, 'tis confest.
Is all my own, and is not quite sub-
lime).
But fame's not yours alone ; you must

divide all
The plums and pudding with the Bard
of Rydal !

P

2IO LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Wordsworth and Byron, these the
lordly names
And these the gods to whom most
incense burns.
' Absurd ! ' cries Swinburne, and in anger
flames.
And in an ^schylean fury spurns
With impious foot your altar, and ex-
claims
And wreathes his laurels on the golden
urns
Where Coleridge's and Shelley's ashes

lie,
Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry.

For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has
never woven
One honest thread of life within his
song;
As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven
So Byron is to Shelley {This is
strong !),
And on Parnassus' peak, divinely cloven.
He may not stand, or stands by cruel
wrong ;

LORD BYRON 211

For Byron's rank (the examiner has

reckoned)
Is in the third class or a feeble second.

' A Bernesque poet ' at the very most,
And "' never earnest save in politics,'

The Pegasus that he was wont to boast
A blundering, floundering hackney,
full of tricks,

A beast that must be driven to the post
By whips and spurs and oaths and
kicks and sticks,

A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute.

That any judge of Pegasi would shoot ;

In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far
gone
In spavin, curb, and half a hundred
woes.
And Byron's style is * jolter-headed jar-
gon ; '
His verse is ' only bearable in prose.'
So living poets write of those that are
gone.
And o'er the Eagle thus the Bantam
crows ;

212 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

And Swinburne ends where Verisopht

began,
By owning you * a very clever man.'

Or rather does not end : he still must
utter
A quantity of the unkindest things.
Ah ! were you here, I marvel, would
you flutter
O'er such a foe the tempest of your
wings ?
'Tis ' rant and cant and glare and splash
and splutter '
That rend the modest air when Byron
sings.
There Swinburne stops : a critic rather

fiery.
A^iimis ccelestibus tantcene ires?

But whether he or Arnold in the right
is,
Long is the argument, the quarrel
long;
Non nobis est to settle tantas lites ;
No poet I, to judge of right or wrong :

LORD BYRON 213

But of all things I always think a fight

is
The most unpleasant in the lists of

song;
When Marsyas of old was flayed,

Apollo
Set an example which we need not

follow.

The fashion changes ! Maidens do not

wear,
As once they wore, in necklaces and

lockets
A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron's

hair ;
' Don Juan ' is not always in our

pockets —
Nay, a New Writer's readers do not

care
Much for your verse, but are inclined

to mock its
Manners and morals. Ay, and most

young ladies
To yours prefer the ' Epic ' called ' of

Hades ' !

214 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

I do not blame them ; I'm inclined to

think
That with the reigning taste 'tis vain

to quarrel,
And Burns might teach his votaries to

drink,
And Byron never meant to make them

moral.
You yet have lovers true, who will not

shrink
From lauding you and giving you the

laurel ;
The Germans too, those men of blood

and iron,
Of all our poets chiefly swear by

Byron.

Farewell, thou Titan fairer than the
Gods!
Farewell, farewell, thou swift and
lovely spirit.
Thou splendid warrior with the world
at odds,
Unpraised, unpraisable, beyond thy
merit ;

LORD BYRON 215

Chased, like Orestes, by the Furies' rods,
Like him at length thy peace dost
thou inherit ;

Beholding whom, men think how fairer
far

Than all the steadfast stars the wander-
ing star ! ^

^ Mr. Swinburne's and Mr. Arnold's diverse
views of Byron will be found in the Selections by
Mr. Arnold and in the Nineteenth Century.

2i6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

XXL

To Omar Khayyam.

Wise Omar, do the Southern Breezes

fling
Above your Grave, at ending of the

Spring,
The Snowdrift of the Petals of the

Rose,
The wild white Roses you were wont to

sing ?

Far in the South I know a Land divine,'

And there is many a Saint and many a

Shrine,

And over all the Shrines the Blossom

blows

Of Roses that were dear to you as Wine.

' The hills above San Remo, where rose-bushes
are planted by the shrines. Omar desired that his
grave might be where the wind would scatter rose-
leaves over it.

OMAR KHAYYAM 217

You were a Saint of unbelieving Days,
Liking your Life and happy in Men's

Praise ;
Enough for you the Shade beneath

the Bough,
Enough to watch the wild World go its

Ways.

Dreadless and hopeless thou of Heaven

or Hell,
Careless of Words thou hadst not Skill

to spell,
Content to know not all thou knowest

now.
What's Death ? Doth any Pitcher dread

the Well?

The Pitchers we, whose Maker makes

them ill,
Shall He torment them if they chance

to spill ?
Nay, like the broken Potsherds are

we cast
Forth and forgotten, — and what will be

will !

21 8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS-

So Still were we, before the Months

began
That rounded us and shaped us into

Man.
So still we shall be, surely, at the last,
Dreamless, untouched of Blessing or of

Ban!

Ah, strange it seems that this thy com-
mon Thought —

How all Things have been, ay, and shall
be nought —
Was ancient Wisdom in thine ancient
East,

In those old Days when Senlac Fight
was fought.

Which gave our England for a captive

Land
To pious Chiefs of a believing Band,

A gift to the Believer from the Priest,
Tossed from the holy to the blood-red

Hand ! '

* Omar was contemporary with the battle of
Hastings.

OMAR KHAYYAM 219

Yea, thou wert singing when that Arrow

clave
Through Helm and Brain of him who

could not save
His England, even of Harold Godwin's

son ;
The high Tide murmurs by the Hero's

Grave ! ^

And thou wert wreathing Roses — who

can tell ? —
Or chanting for some Girl that pleased

thee well,
Or satst at Wine in Nashapur, when

dun
The twilight veiled the Field where

Harold fell !

The salt Sea-waves above him rage and

roam !
Along the white Walls of his guarded

Home
No Zephyr stirs the Rose, but o'er

the Wave

• Per mandata Ducis, Rex hie, Heralde, quiescis,
Ut cusios tnaneas Hit oris et pelagi.

220 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

The wild Wind beats the Breakers into
Foam !

And dear to him, as Roses were to thee,
Rings the long Roar of Onset of the

Sea ;
The Swan's Path of his Fathers is his

Grave :
His Sleep, methinks, is sound as thine

can be.

His was the Age of Faith, when all the

West
Looked to the Priest for Torment or for

Rest;
And thou wert living then, and didst

not heed
The Saint who banned thee or the Saint

who blessed !

Ages of Progress ! These eight hundred
Years

Hath Europe shuddered with her Hopes
or Fears,
And now ! — she listens in the Wilder-
ness

OMAR KHAYYAM 221

To thee, and half belieyeth what she
hears !

Hadst thou THE SECRET ? Ah, and who

may tell ?
'An Hour we have,' thou saidst ; 'Ah,

waste it well ! '
An Hour we have, and yet Eternity
Looms o'er us, and the Thought of

Heaven or Hell !

Nay, we can never be as wise as thou,
O idle Singer 'neath the blossomed
Bough.
Nay, and we cannot be content to die.
We cannot shirk the Questions 'Where t '
and ' How } '

Ah, not from learned Peace and gay

Content
Shall we of England go the way he

went —
The Singer of the Red Wine and the

Rose —
Nay, otherwise than his our Day is

spent !

222 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Serene he dwelt in fragrant Nashapur,
But we must wander while the Stars

endure.
He knew the Secret : we have none

that knows,
No Man so sure as Omar once was sure !

223

XXII.

To Q. Horatius Flaccus.

In what manner of Paradise are we to
conceive that you, Horace, are dwelling,
or what region of immortality can give
you such pleasures as this life afforded ?
The country and the town, nature and
men, who knew them so well as you, or
who ever so wisely made the best of
those two worlds ? Truly here you had
good things, nor do you ever, in all your
poems, look for more delight in the life
beyond ; you never expect consolation
for present sorrow, and when you once
have shaken hands with a friend the part-
ing seems to you eternal.

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tarn cari capitis ?

So you sing, for the dear head you
mourn has sunk, for ever, beneath the

224 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

wave. Virgil might wander forth bearing
the golden branch * the Sibyl doth to sing-
ing men allow/ and might visit, as one
not wholly without hope, the dim dwell-
ings of the dead and the unborn. To
him was it permitted to see and sing

* mothers and men, and the bodies out-
worn of mighty heroes, boys and un-
wedded maids, and young men borne to
the funeral fire before their parents' eyes.'
The endless caravan swept past him —

* many as fluttering leaves that drop and
fall in autumn woods when the first frost
begins ; many as birds that flock land-
ward from the great sea when now the
chill year drives them o'er the deep
and leads them to sunnier lands.' Such
things was it given to the sacred poet to
behold, and * the happy seats and sweet
pleasances of fortunate souls, where the
larger light clothes all the plains and
dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with
their own new sun and stars before un-
known.' Ah, not fi'ustra plus was Virgil,
as you say, Horace, in your melancholy

Q. HORATIUS FLA ecus 225

song. In him, we fancy, there was a
happier mood than your melancholy
patience. ' Not, though thou wert sweeter
of song than Thracian Orpheus, with
that lyre whose lay led the dancing
trees, not so would the blood return to
the empty shade of him whom once
with dread wand, the inexorable God
hath folded with his shadowy flocks ; but
patience lighteneth what heaven forbids
us to undo.'

Durum, sed levius Jit patlential

It was all your philosophy in that last
sad resort to which we are pushed so
often —

' With close-lipped Patience for our only friend,
Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair.*

The Epicurean is at one with the
Stoic at last, and Horace with Marcus
Aurelius. ' To go away from among
men, if there are Gods, is not a thing to
be afraid of; but if indeed they do not
exist, or if they have no concern about
human affairs, what is it to me to live

Q

226 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

in a universe devoid of gods or devoid
of providence ? '

An excellent philosophy, but easier
to those for whom no Hope had dawned
or seemed to set. Yes ! it is harder than
common, Horace, for us to think o{ yoti,
still glad somewhere, among rivers like
Liris and plains and vine-clad hills, that

Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.

It is hard, for you looked for no such
thing.

Omnes una viauet nox
Et calcanda semel via leti.

You could not tell Maecenas that you
would meet him again ; you could only
promise to tread the dark path with
him.

Ibimus^ ibimuSj
Utcunque prcecedes^ supremum
Carper^er co mites par at i.

Enough, Horace, of these mortuary
musings. You loved the lesson of the
roses, and now and again would speak
somewhat like a death's head over your
temperate cups of Sabine ordinaire. Your

Q. HOR Alius FLACCUS 227

melancholy moral was but meant to
heighten the joy of your pleasant life,
when wearied Italy, after all her wars
and civic bloodshed, had won a peaceful
haven. The harbour might be trea-
cherous ; the prince might turn to the
tyrant ; far away on the wide Roman
marches might be heard, as it were, the
endless, ceaseless monotone of beating
horses' hoofs and marching feet of men.
They were coming, they were nearing,
like footsteps heard on wool ; there was
a sound of multitudes and millions of
barbarians, all the North, officina gentium,
mustering and marshalling her peoples.
But their coming was not to be to-da}',
nor to-morrow, nor to-day was the
budding Empire to blossom into the
blood-red flower of Nero. In the lull
between the two tempests of Republic
and Empire your odes sound * like lin-
nets in the pauses of the wind.'

What joy there is in these songs !
what delight of life, what an exquisite
Hellenic grace of art, what a manly

228 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

nature to endure, what tenderness and
constancy of friendship, what a sense of
all that is fair in the glittering stream,
the music of the waterfall, the hum of
bees, the silvery grey of the olive woods
on the hillside ! How human are all
your verses, Horace ! what a pleasure is
yours in the straining poplars, swaying
in the wind ! what gladness you gain
from the white crest of Soracte, beheld
through the fluttering snowflakes while
the logs are being piled higher on the
hearth. You sing of women and wine
— not all whole-hearted in your praise of
them, perhaps, for passion frightens you,
and 'tis pleasure more than love that
you commend to the young. Lydia
and Glycera, and the others, are but
passing guests of a heart at ease in it-
self, and happy enough when^their facile
reign is ended. You seem to me like a
man who welcomes middle age, and is
more glad than Sophocles was to ' flee
from these hard masters ' the passions.
In the fallow leisure of life you glance

Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS 229

round contented, and find all very good
save the need to leave all behind. Even
that. you take with an Italian good-
humour, as the folk of your sunny coun-
try bear poverty and hunger.

Durum^ sed levins fit patientia !

To them, to you, the loveliness of
your land is, and was, a thing to live
for. None of the Latin poets your
fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me
to have known so well as you, Horace,
how happy and fortunate a thing it was
to be born in Italy. You do not say so,
like your Virgil, in one splendid passage,
numbering the glories of the land as a
lover might count the perfections of his
mistress. But the sentiment is ever in
your heart and often on your lips.

Me nee tarn patiens Lacedsemon,
Nee tarn Larissse pereussit campus opimae,

Quam domus Albunese resonantis
Et praeeeps Anio, ac Tiburni lueus, et uda

Mobilibus pomaria rivis. '

' ' Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich La-
risssean plain so enraptures as the fane of echoing

230 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

So a poet should speak, and to every
singer his own land should be dearest.
Beautiful is Italy with the grave and
delicate outlines of her sacred hills, her
dark groves, her little cities perched like
eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding
under ancient walls ; beautiful is Italy,
her seas, and her suns : but dearer to me
tlie long grey wave that bites the rock
below the minster in the north ; dearer
are the barren moor and black peat-water
swirling in tauny foam, and the scent of
bog myrtle and the bloom of heather,
and, watching over the lochs, the green
round-shouldered hills.

In affection for your native land,
Horace, certainly the pride in great
Romans dead and gone made part, and
you were, in all senses, a lover of your
country, your country's heroes, your
country's gods. None but a patriot
could have sung that ode on Regulus,
who died, as our own hero died on an

Albunea, the headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, th
orchards watered by the wandering rills,'

Q. HO RATI US FLA ecus 231

evil day, for the honour of Rome, as
Gordon for the honour of England.

Fertur pudicse conjugis osculum,
Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor,
Ab se removisse, et virilem
Torvus humi posuisse voltum :

Donee labantes consilio patres
Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato,
Interque maerentes amicos
Egregius properaret exul.

Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet : non aliter tamen
Dimovit obstantes propinquos,
Et populum reditus morantem,

Quam si clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret,
Tendens Venafranos in agros
Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum.'

' ' They say he put aside from him the pure lips of
his wife and his little children, like a man unfree, and
with his brave face bowed earthward sternly he waited
till with such counsel as never mortal gave he might
strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and through his
mourning friends go forth, a hero, into exile. Yet
well he knew what things were being prepared for
him at the hands of the tormentors, who, none the less,
put aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the

232 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

We talk of the Greeks as your
teachers. Your teachers they were, but
that poem could only have been written
by a Roman ! The strength, the tender-
ness, the noble and monumental resolu-
tion and resignation — these are the gifts
of the lords of human things, the masters
of the world.

Your country's heroes are dear to
you, Horace, but you did not sing them
better than your country's Gods, the
pious protecting spirits of the hearth,
the farm, the field; kindly ghosts, it
may be, of Latin fathers dead or Gods
framed in the image of these. What
you actually believed we know not, you
knew not. Who knows what he believes }
Parens Deorum cultor you bowed not
often, it may be, in the temples of the
state religion and before the statues
of the great Olympians ; but the pure

people that would fain have delayed his return, passing
through their midst as he might have done if, his re-
tainers' weary business ended and the suits adjudged,
he were faring to his Venafran lands or to Durian
Tarentum.'

Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS 233

and pious worship of rustic tradition,
the faith handed down by the homely
elders, with that you never broke. Clean
hands and a pure heart, these, with a
sacred cake and shining grains of salt,
you could offer to the Lares. It was
a benignant religion, uniting old times
and new, men living and men long dead
and gone, in a kind of service and sacri-
fice solemn yet familiar.

Te nihil attinet K^ "^^t^ 2. 9i

Tentare multa ccede bidentiuvi \ -ttt- j.3
Parvos coronantem marino ^ — - —
Rore deos fragilique 77iyrto.

Immunis aram si tetigit manus^
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
Mollivit aversos Penates
Farre pio et saliente mica. •

' ' Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods
with slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest
thy tiny deities with myrtle rare and rosemary. If
but the hand be clean that touches the altar, then
richest sacrifice will not more appease the angered
Penates than the duteous cake and salt that crackles
in the blaze.'

R

234 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

Farewell, dear Horace ; farewell, thou
wise and kindly heathen ; of mortals the
most human, the friend of my friends
and of so many generations of men.

Ave atque Vale !

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